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Thought Experiment 95: The Problem of Evil

5/29/2017

In a world with cats, how can one claim God exists?

After some fun thought experiments dealing with zombies, artificial intelligence, and a deep flaw in the laws of logic, Baggini is taking us back to an old chestnut about religion this week. How vile of him.

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And the Lord spake unto the philosopher, "I am the Lord thy God, all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing."
   "Surely not," replied the philosopher. "I look at this world and see horrible disease, hunger, starvation, mental illness. Yet you don't stop it. Is it that you can't? In which case you are not all-powerful. Is it because you don't know about it? In which case you are not all-knowing. Or perhaps you don't want to? In which case you are not all-loving.
   "Such impudence!" replied the Lord. "It is better for you if I don't stop all this evil. You need to grow morally and spiritually. For that you need the freedom to do evil as well as good, and to confront the chance occurrence of suffering. How could I possibly have made the world better without taking away your freedom to grow?"
   "Easy," replied the philosopher. "First, you could have designed us so that we feel less pain. Second, you could have made sure we had more empathy, to prevent us doing evil to others. Third, you could have made us better learners, so we didn't have to suffer so much to grow. Fourth, you could have made nature less cruel. Do you want me to go on?"

Source: The problem of evil recurs in different forms throughout the history of theology.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 283.
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What do you think? Is the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of God really undermined by these rational arguments? Why don't billions of people think so? I'll be back on Friday with my thoughts on this.

2 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 94: The Sorites Tax

5/26/2017

0 Comments

Be sure to check that very, very fine print.

At first glance, this week's thought experiment might seem silly and easy to dismiss. But seeing as how it undermines the entire field of logic and currently has no accepted resolution, I'd say it's definitely worth spending some time to consider in more detail. For those of us taking an evolutionary perspective on the real world, we see the consequences of this theoretical problem showing up in the species problem, whereby despite all the confident day-to-day talk of various species in the world, it's actually very, very difficult to define them with full accuracy. Charles Darwin noted this in On the Origin of Species when he wrote,

I was much struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the distinction between species and varieties.

To philosophers in search of perfect rigour, such an ultimate consequence is indeed vexing. But let's start with a simpler introduction and then see where that takes us.

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A Political Broadcast by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Sorites

   These are taxing times for our country. The last government left us with run-down public finances and the need to raise extra revenue. But you, the people, do not want to have to foot the bill. So how can we raise the money we need without making you feel pain?
   The answer is simple. Focus groups, opinion polls, and economists have shown that charging an extra 0.01 percent tax has a negligible effect on personal income. No one who is comfortably off is made to struggle, no one rich is made poor, no one already struggling is made to struggle more, by paying 0.01 percent extra on their tax bill.
   So today we are raising income tax by 0.01 percent. And logically, since this small amount makes as little difference to the person who earns 0.01 percent less than you as it does to you, we can repeat the step tomorrow, when you are in the position of that insignificantly poorer person. And so the next day, and the next, for the next 300 days.
   Each time we raise taxes, we do so in a way that makes no difference to your quality of life. And so your quality of life will not be affected. Yet, miraculously, the net effect of these measures will be a large increase in government revenue, which we intend to use to cut the national debt and still have enough change left to buy everyone in the country a drink. We hope you will use it to toast to our ingenuity.

Source: The ancient Sorites paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, 4th century BCE.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 280.
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This example of the Sorites Paradox relies on playing with various lengths of time, so I think it's a bit easier to deal with. To the citizens of this government, they're simply facing a 3% tax raise during the year, which is an easily measurable unit of time to discuss the implications of the policy. And as new reader Tina said in a comment on my post on Monday, " taxes are due all at once." So even if you were to slice the units of time for the accrual of this tax all the way down to every one of the 25,920,000 seconds that exist in 300 days, you would still arrive at a 3% tax raise eventually. And this reminds me of my Response to Zeno's Paradox where I pointed out how time waits for no man and it will not stand still no matter how much we think about it. There may be uncertainty about when precisely the tax raise becomes noticeable, but in the end it certainly does.

There is a deeper problem here, however, which is that philosophers would very much like to speak about everything very precisely. And in the original Sorites paradox, this included not just precise moments in time, but any physical definitions as well. If, for example, you remove grains of sand from a pile one at a time, when is it no longer "a heap?" Answers to this question are either arbitrary or unimportant, but that leads to a profound problem, as Baggini noted in his comments on this thought experiment:

Many argue that the way out requires us to accept the vagueness of many concepts, such as rich and poor, tall or short, heap or pile. The problem with that solution is that, if we allow too much vagueness into language and logic, reason itself becomes vague. The alternative — that tiny changes really can make the difference between being rich and being poor — preserves the rigour of logic and language, but seemingly at the cost of realism.

So we can either be logical or we can be realistic — that's quite a difficult decision! Is it really necessary to choose? Over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), there's an extensive entry on the Sorites paradox, which (among other things) outlines the various responses that have been attempted to answer that question. Under section 3, it goes through the following possible solutions in great detail:

3.1) Ideal Language Approaches (i.e. the vagueness of natural language can be eliminated using more precision)
3.2) The Epistemic Response (i.e. sharp semantic boundaries are essentially unknowable)
3.3) Supervaluationism (i.e. a proposition can have a truth value even when its components do not)
3.4) Many-Valued Logic (i.e. some number of non-classical truth-values can be used to model vagueness)
3.5) Contextualism (i.e. context-dependent interpretations just mask the relevant boundaries)
3.6) Embracing the Paradox (i.e. radical incoherence — no amount of grains of sand makes a heap)

All of these, however, are found in turn to be seriously lacking. The only conclusion that the SEP arrives at is:

The sorites paradox presents a serious logical challenge.

Indeed. In a related SEP entry on The Philosophical Challenge Posed By Vagueness, we learn that "most philosophers doubt whether precise analytical tools fit vague arguments. H. G. Wells was amongst the first to suggest that we must moderate the application of logic." In his philosophical text of 1908, First and Last Things, H. G. Wells said this:

Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for stupidity—for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philosophical or metaphysical enquiry through a series of valid syllogisms—never committing any generally recognized fallacy—you nevertheless leave behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective truth and you get deflections that are difficult to trace at each phase in the process.

Is that the answer then? That we must only apply logic and rigor at a macro level, never pushing it "too far"? If so, doesn't that answer also fall prey to the Sorites paradox? Won't this ultimately leave us with nothing that we can precisely judge as TRUE or FALSE? In my opinion, yes.

As I discussed in my most important blog post on epistemology, we’ve relied on Plato’s definition of knowledge for millennia as being: 1) justified, 2) true, 3) belief. But that was built on an ancient’s view of the universe as an unchanging and eternal thing. Once we discovered evolution in 1859 and the Big Bang was confirmed by background radiation in the 1960’s, our cosmological revolutions should have led to epistemological revolutions as well, but so far they have not. Gettier challenged Plato’s JTB theory of knowledge, but was unable to replace it. I say that in this changing universe, however, there is no such thing that is eternally TRUE. Therefore, knowledge can only ever be: 1) justified, 2) beliefs, that 3) are surviving.

This is all part of an inherent problem that I now see lies behind many philosophical difficulties. It comes from trying to impose binary TRUE/FALSE logic on an analog world, which is really the result of seeing the universe as something static and unchanging rather than as the dynamic and fluid thing that it is. This may be analogous (though unrelated) to how physics is currently split between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. One works at the smallest scale; the other works at the macro level. I currently think the applicability of philosophy may also be split like this between static and dynamic views of the world. Call it the Static-Dynamic Problem. In the choice between being logical and being realistic, I think one can only apply logic to a static picture where TRUE or FALSE definitions can remain valid. Once you move to the dynamic realm, however, it seems that classical logic breaks down when it is pressed to its limits. I'd like to develop this theory in much greater detail someday, perhaps 0.01% at a time, but that's where I currently think I'm headed with a solution to the Sorites paradox.

What do you think? Does that sound like a promising direction? Until then, can you live with the vagueness?

0 Comments

Thought Experiment 94: The Sorites Tax

5/22/2017

5 Comments

How many grains of sand can be removed before this stops being a dune?

One by one I've been writing little posts about these thought experiments for quite a while now. It sure didn't feel like any single post changed my view of philosophy. And yet...

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A Political Broadcast by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Sorites

   These are taxing times for our country. The last government left us with run-down public finances and the need to raise extra revenue. But you, the people, do not want to have to foot the bill. So how can we raise the money we need without making you feel pain?
   The answer is simple. Focus groups, opinion polls, and economists have shown that charging an extra 0.01 percent tax has a negligible effect on personal income. No one who is comfortably off is made to struggle, no one rich is made poor, no one already struggling is made to struggle more, by paying 0.01 percent extra on their tax bill.
   So today we are raising income tax by 0.01 percent. And logically, since this small amount makes as little difference to the person who earns 0.01 percent less than you as it does to you, we can repeat the step tomorrow, when you are in the position of that insignificantly poorer person. And so the next day, and the next, for the next 300 days.
   Each time we raise taxes, we do so in a way that makes no difference to your quality of life. And so your quality of life will not be affected. Yet, miraculously, the net effect of these measures will be a large increase in government revenue, which we intend to use to cut the national debt and still have enough change left to buy everyone in the country a drink. We hope you will use it to toast to our ingenuity.

Source: The ancient Sorites paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, 4th century BCE.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 280.
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What do you think? When exactly do incremental changes make a big difference? I'll be back on Friday with a quick answer to this one. In the meantime, please leave your thoughts on this in the comment section below. It may not seem worth it to you, but collectively your ideas have really added up.

5 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

5/18/2017

2 Comments

Zombies - totally not scary at all.

As an evolutionary philosopher who looks at the entire history of evolution and only sees evidence for physical, natural, non-supernatural things in the universe, I read the following lines from Philosophy Now's article The Zombie Threat to a Science of Mind and I began to get worried:

Many look forward to the day when physicists will resolve these niggling issues and present the public with the Holy Grail of science: a Grand Unified Theory of everything. The hope of many philosophically-inclined scientists and scientifically-enthused philosophers is that this theory will explain the existence and nature of everything there is. Let us call this kind of view ‘physicalism’. Physicalism is a grand and ambitious project, but there is a thorn in its side: consciousness. The qualities each of us encounters in our conscious experience – the feeling of pain, the sensations of biting into a lemon, what it’s like to see red – stubbornly refuse to be incorporated into the physicalist’s all-encompassing vision of the universe. Consciousness seems to be the one bit of left-over magic that refuses to be physicalized. And it’s all the fault of the zombies.

Did that make me worried about the fate of physicalism? Heck no! Instead, it made me worried about the field of philosophy yet again. Let's take a look at this week's thought experiment and then hunt these zombies down.

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Lucia lived in a town where the lights were on, but nobody was ever home. She lived among zombies.
This was not as scary as it might sound. These zombies were not the flesh-eating ghouls of horror films. They looked and behaved just like you and I. They even had exactly the same physiology as you and I. But there was one key difference: they had no minds. If you pricked them they would say "ouch" and wince, but they felt no pain. If you "upset" them they would cry or get angry, but there would be no inner turmoil. If you played them soothing music they would appear to enjoy it, but in their minds they would hear nothing. On the outside, they were ordinary humans, but on the inside, nothing was going on.
This made them easy to get along with. It was easy to forget that they didn't have inner lives as she did, since they spoke and behaved just like ordinary people and that included references to how they felt or what they thought. Visitors to the town would also fail to notice anything strange. Even when Lucia let them in on the secret, they refused to believe her.
"How do you know that they have no minds?" they would ask. "How do you know that other people do?" would be Lucia's reply. That usually shut them up.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 277.
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Baggini didn't cite any sources for this problem, but the greatest popularizer of the idea, David Chalmers, gives us this brief history of philosophical zombies:

As far as I know, the first paper in the philosophical literature to talk at length about zombies under that name was Robert Kirk's "Zombies vs. Materialists" in Mind in 1974, although Keith Campbell's 1970 book Body and Mind talks about an "imitation-man" which is much the same thing, and the idea arguably goes back to Leibniz's "mill" argument. After Kirk's paper, there was hardly any explicit discussion of zombies in the philosophical literature for a long time (although there was quite a lot on "absent qualia", i.e. functional zombies). When I wrote my 1993 Ph.D. thesis, in which zombies played a central role, there was hardly anything out there. But for one reason or another, zombies have risen from the grave in the last few years; and they turn out to be unaccountably well-represented on the web.

Unaccountable is right!

Now, it's mildly fun to go down the path of exploring consciousness and trying to prove that zombies can't possibly exist and therefore prove that consciousness is only a physical phenomenon. I thought about using this post to look into medical conditions where people already act sort of like zombies and see how that might inform us. If you look into the psychological literature on topics such as unconscious phenomena, sleepwalking, automatism, highway hypnosis or, dissociation, you find a whole host of actions where people appear to exhibit normal behavior but they have no memory of doing so. They acted, as it were, with their "lights out." Such behaviors point to at least the transient existence of real life zombies, but because these activities actually all have traceable physical causes or effects, they do not produce philosophical zombies. The subjects never show loss of consciousness without some corresponding change in physical activities.

All of that would lead me to believe there is a strong case to be made for the physical nature of consciousness, but still, can we really rule out ALL possibilities of philosophical zombies? No. Of course not. But that's okay. There are an infinite number of things that we can't rule out as impossible (gods, flying teacups, spaghetti monsters, etc., etc.), but we don't fret about each and every one of them. Chalmers, however, thinks this one is different for some reason. Going back to the Philosophy Now article on this subject, we see why in this summary of Chalmers' points. He says:

We can break down this zombie argument against physicalism as follows:
1. Philosophical zombies are possible.
2. Therefore, human brain states could possibly exist without human conscious states.
3. Therefore, human brain states cannot be identical with human conscious states.
4. For physicalism to be true, human brain states must be identical with human conscious states.
5. Therefore, physicalism is false.

Seriously?? Premise number one has to be allowed because we don't have a full definition of consciousness yet and anything is possible to discover when we don't know the future. That doesn't mean physicalism is false though. It just means physicalism may be false. Conclusion 3, must be rewritten "Therefore, human brain states*may not* be identical with human conscious states." We just don't know yet.

Once again, we see philosophers getting bogged down due to an inherent contradiction with their epistemology. Chalmers starts his argument by saying that our epistemological uncertainty allows zombies to maybe just possibly exist. That's fine. We cannot know what the future will bring. But then he wants to use that inherent uncertainty to arrive at an epistemologically certain statement that "physicalism is false." But if Chalmers were to play by the same epistemological rules from start to finish, he would only ever get to the conclusion that physicalism is possible. Just like zombies. Except, you know, there's all the evidence in the universe so far for physicalism.

I'm not exactly the first person to point this out. Too many physicalists like Daniel Dennett have gone after Chalmers by claiming his physiological zombies are logically incoherent and thus impossible, but that's a fools errand while the science is in its infancy. When you look at those competing arguments for the possibility or impossibility of philosophical zombies, it becomes obvious that both sides are using circular / begging the question fallacies. To claim zombies are possible is just claiming that consciousness isn't physical. To claim zombies are impossible is just claiming consciousness is only physical. So you can't use zombies to say anything new about consciousness. Richard Brown showed this, by proposing "the existence of "zoombies", which are creatures nonphysically identical to people in every way and lack phenomenal consciousness. If zoombies existed, they would refute dualism because they would show that consciousness is not nonphysical, i.e., is physical. Paralleling the argument from Chalmers: It's conceivable that zoombies exist, so it's possible they exist, so dualism is false."

That's very clever, and it hints at the fact that philosophical zombies are neither TRUE nor FALSE yet, which is why the form of Chalmers' argument can be used in either direction. Cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad managed to point this out specifically in his 1995 article, "Why and how we are not zombies." He wrote:

This is ordinary scientific underdetermination: You can always predict and explain a small body of data in lots of ways, most or all of which have nothing to do with reality. But as you predict and explain more and more data, your degrees of freedom shrink and your theory gets more powerful and general. The hope, in all areas of science, is that when it is complete, and predicts and explains all observable data, then your theory will have converged on reality; it will be the true theory of the way things are. [But] it might not be.

So if Brown and Harnad refuted the argument so well, why are zombies still a hot topic? Maybe it's because their arguments didn't follow up with a call for a revolution in epistemology (like I have done), which ultimately allows philosophers to just keep on playing games. I guess that's why philosophers aren't scientists—because they enjoy speculating about the unknown and fighting about what may or may not be there while the evidence is gathered by others. I often find that tedious and pointless though. How many similar conundrums could be imagined about dark matter, abiogenisis, life on other planets, or any of the other great mysteries science has identified but so far been unable to solve? One can imagine an infinite variety of debates about these, all just waiting to fill up philosophical journals. But none of these merely potential occurrences have any weight whatsoever to actually affect our current knowledge. They are observations with an n of zero. So to me, there's really no need to continue running around moaning about them. That'd just be brainless.

2 Comments

Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

5/15/2017

6 Comments

Self-portrait of author gritting his teeth over this question.

Brains! Sometimes I wonder if zombies eat them because they're philosophers on the hunt for usable parts.

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Lucia lived in a town where the lights were on, but nobody was ever home. She lived among zombies.
This was not as scary as it might sound. These zombies were not the flesh-eating ghouls of horror films. They looked and behaved just like you and I. They even had exactly the same physiology as you and I. But there was one key difference: they had no minds. If you pricked them they would say "ouch" and wince, but they felt no pain. If you "upset" them they would cry or get angry, but there would be no inner turmoil. If you played them soothing music they would appear to enjoy it, but in their minds they would hear nothing. On the outside, they were ordinary humans, but on the inside, nothing was going on.
This made them easy to get along with. It was easy to forget that they didn't have inner lives as she did, since they spoke and behaved just like ordinary people and that included references to how they felt or what they thought. Visitors to the town would also fail to notice anything strange. Even when Lucia let them in on the secret, they refused to believe her.
"How do you know that they have no minds?" they would ask. "How do you know that other people do?" would be Lucia's reply. That usually shut them up.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 277.
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So what do you think — are so-called philosophical-zombies a legitimate possibility? I'll do my best to turn on the lights and think about this over the week ahead and get back to you on Friday with my ideas.

6 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 92: Autogovernment

5/12/2017

0 Comments

Hail to the Commodore Chief!

To give you an idea about the age of computers, it's only been 35 years since the introduction of the 64 kilobyte Commodore 64. Given that this is a fraction of a nanosecond in evolutionary time, how incredibly absurd is it to think that the whole universe is nothing but a computer simulation? (Incredibly absurd.) But can we foresee a time soon when deep learning machines will have more intelligence than we can understand, and will therefore be given control over our lives? Maybe. At least to some extent. But just how much? That's the crux of this week's thought experiment.

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It is crazy to think that in the bad old days, ministers who perhaps knew very little about economics were trusted to make important decisions about such matters as spending and taxation. It was some improvement when the power to set interest rates was transferred to central bankers. But the real breakthrough came when computers became good enough to manage the economy more efficiently than people. The supercomputer Greenspan Two, for example, ran the US economy for twenty years, during which time growth was constant and above the long-term average; there were no price bubbles or crashes; and unemployment stayed low.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the leader in the race for the White House, according to all the (computer conducted and highly accurate) opinion polls is another computer—or at least someone promising to let the computer make all the decisions. Bentham, as it is known, will be able to determine the effects of all policies on the general happiness of the population. Its supporters claim it will effectively remove humans from politics altogether. And because computers have no character flaws or vested interests, Bentham will be a vast improvement on the politicians it would replace. So far, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have come up with a persuasive counter-argument.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 274.
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Given the dangerous and discouraging ineptitude of Republican, Democrat, Tory, and Labour party politicians (to name just a few), we might happily jump at the chance to elect a computer. Heck, Mark Zuckerberg might be smart to try this during the next election. If you're reading this blog, you probably have a lot of comfort with computers making decisions, but before we happily replace Donald Trump with one, let's look at the sticking point that Baggini would like us to consider in this experiment. Here is his own discussion on it:

The idea of letting computers run our lives still strikes most of us as a little creepy. At the same time, in practice, we trust ourselves to computers all the time. Our finances are managed almost entirely by computers, and nowadays many people trust an ATM to log their transactions accurately more than a human banker. Computers also run light railways, and if you fly you may be unaware that for long periods the pilots are doing nothing at all. In fact, computers could easily handle landings and take-offs: it's just that passengers can't yet accept the idea of them doing so. ... Dispensing with humans altogether is not so easy. The problem is that the goals need to be set for the computer. And the goal of politics is not simply to make as many people happy as possible. For example, we have to decide how much inequality we are prepared to tolerate. One policy might make more people happy overall, but at the cost of leaving 5 percent of the population in wretched conditions. We might prefer a slightly less happy society where no one has to live a miserable life. A computer cannot decide which of these outcomes is better; only we can do that. ... The day may well come, perhaps sooner than we think, when computers will be able to manage the economy and even public services better than people. But it is harder to see how they could decide what is best for us and send all politicians packing forever.

Okay, so it must be said that when we want to replace politicians with computers, what we really mean is that we want to replace them with algorithms written by computer programmers. It would be circular to try to have computers determine the goals of those algorithms on their own, but what ultimate goals should we tell the programmers to accomplish? The single most important point of this evolutionary philosophy website is to argue that the survival of life in general over the long term of evolutionary timelines is the objective goal that forms the basis of what we ought to act towards, but that hasn't been broadly accepted yet. Instead, academic philosophers would probably vote right now that the best candidate for a goal to give computer programmers would be some form of utilitarianism where the goal would be to "maximize well being." I hate to rehash my whole long-running argument that "well being" is subjective until it is grounded in the objective fact that to have well-being you must first have existence, and that requires the survival of life, but this is a big reason why the computer for president just doesn't work at the moment. For instance, the name for the computer in this thought experiment is inspired by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), presumably because of his felicific calculus, which is "an algorithm for calculating the degree or amount of pleasure that a specific action is likely to cause. [And since Bentham was] an ethical hedonist, he believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it produced. ... The felicific calculus could, in principle at least, determine the moral status of any considered act."

Sounds good in theory, but what does this look like in practice?

Bentham included seven variables in his calculations:

Intensity: How strong is the pleasure?
Duration: How long will the pleasure last?
Certainty or uncertainty: How likely or unlikely is it that the pleasure will occur?
Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will the pleasure occur?
Fecundity: The probability that the action will be followed by sensations of the same kind.
Purity: The probability that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite kind.
Extent: How many people will be affected?

And then he gave the following instructions on how to use these variables:

"To take an exact account of the general tendency of any act, by which the interests of a community are affected, proceed as follows. Begin with any one person of those whose interests seem most immediately to be affected by it: and take an account,

Of the value of each distinguishable pleasure which appears to be produced by it in the first instance.
Of the value of each pain which appears to be produced by it in the first instance.
Of the value of each pleasure which appears to be produced by it after the first. This constitutes the fecundity of the first pleasure and the impurity of the first pain.
Of the value of each pain which appears to be produced by it after the first. This constitutes the fecundity of the first pain, and the impurity of the first pleasure.
Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those of all the pains on the other. The balance, if it be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect to the interests of that individual person; if on the side of pain, the bad tendency of it upon the whole.
Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be concerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each. Sum up the numbers expressive of the degrees of good tendency, which the act has, with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is good upon the whole. Do this again with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is bad upon the whole. Take the balance which if on the side of pleasure, will give the general good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number or community of individuals concerned; if on the side of pain, the general evil tendency, with respect to the same community."

Do you think any computer programmer or mathematician could come up formulas and values to accurately and comprehensively model all of this?? Of course not!! And even if they did, we already know that the goal of "maximizing well-being" leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (i.e. 100 billion mostly miserable people > 1 billion happy people), which is an Achilles' heel of utilitarianism that I wrote a long post about. In that post, I listed many of the principles in The Black Swan about robustness and fragility that can be used to guide actions into an unknown future. Those would be important parameters for the algorithm in this week's thought experiment, but rather than reiterate them, perhaps an example of when we've ignored them in a computer model would be more emotionally instructive. Especially since it went horribly wrong and we all paid for it.

The Black-Scholes equation. You paid for the people who trusted this.

I won't go into the meaning of the terms above, but the Black-Scholes model is a mathematical equation which estimates the price of financial options over time. The key idea behind it is "to hedge an option by buying and selling the underlying asset in just the right way and, as a consequence, eliminate risk." This formula was published in 1973 in an article entitled "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities", in the Journal of Political Economy, and its authors Merton and Scholes received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their work. (Black had died so was no longer eligible for his Nobel Prize.) However, and this just screams out to good philosophers as a fundamental problem of epistemology, "the Black–Scholes formula has only one parameter that cannot be observed in the market: the average future volatility of the underlying asset." But this can never be known! And so any financial bets made by estimating the future will eventually lose at some point. That would be okay if your bets were reasonable, but do you think this knowledge has kept people from placing huge bets using their fancy formula? Ha!

The predictably tragic story of human hubris was told in the BBC documentary, Trillion Dollar Bet: The Black-Scholes Formula. It's "the story of one of finance’s greatest formulas, the Black-Scholes option pricing model, which won two of its developers the prestigious Nobel Prize. It explores how the hedge fund which they founded, Long Term Capital Management, which promised to generate large returns with low risk through mathematical models spectacularly blew up and had to be bailed out by a consortium of banks to avoid systemic risk in the financial markets." It's a well told story that's worth the 45-minute viewing time if you click on the link above, but here are a few choice quotes:

"Traders are convinced that success in the markets is all to do with human judgment and intuition. Qualities that could never be reduced to a formula. However, this view has powerful opposition. An important group of academics who study the markets mathematically believe that such success is largely a matter of luck."

"The formula that Black, Scholes, and Merton unleashed on the world in 1973 was sparse and deceptively simple. Yet this lean mathematical shorthand was the fulfiment of a 50-year quest. Here was a formula, which could, it seemed, get rid of risk in the financial markets. Academics marveled at its breathtaking insights and its sheer audacity."

"By allowing them to hedge their risks constantly, the traders could feel safe enough to conduct business on a scale they had never dreamt possible. The risks in stocks could be hedged against futures. Those in futures against currency transactions. And all of them hedged against a panoply of new complex financial derivatives, many of which were expressly invented to exploit the Black-Scholes formula. The basic dynamic of the Black-Scholes model is the idea that through dynamic hedging, we can eliminate risk. So we have a mathematical argument for trading a lot. What a wonderful thing for exchanges to hear! The more we trade, the better off society is because of the less risk there is. ... Then the inventors of it decided to make money for themselves."

The first few years of Long Term Capital Management went spectacularly well, but that just added to the magnitude of the eventual downfall that was entirely predictable. When a series of "fluke events" in 1998 brought about things "that had never been seen before," the Black-Scholes model no longer worked and it led to incredible losses. The hedge fund run by these Nobel Prize winners owed one-hundred billion dollars and exposed America's largest banks to more than $1 trillion in default risks. The federal government felt forced to organize a bailout. This one didn't directly cost taxpayers any money, but fees, interest rates, and market returns changed negatively for everyone and the precedent of "too big to fail" had been set, which led to 2008's housing crisis, another scapegoat-free bailout, and the strong likelihood that we are on our way to yet another such event. We should know better, but the movie ends with a telling quote about why we don't:

"The beautiful Black-Scholes formula continues to be used millions of times a day by traders who know when to trust it and when to turn instead to their own intuition, by people who understand that the financial markets are places full of dangers and mysteries that have not yet been reduced to a scientific explanation. ... There's one thing that's clear. Over the last several hundred years, we've been able to identify some people who can do it better than others. They don't necessarily go to MIT, they don't necessarily have degrees in mathematics, though that doesn't automatically rule them out. They're the kind of people that can make that judgment that says, "something's different here. I'm going back to harbor until I figure it out." Those are the kind of people you want running your money. But there is a tempting and fatal fascination with mathematics. Albert Einstein warned against it. He said, "Elegance is for tailors. Don't believe in something because it's a beautiful formula."

Alas, we still believe. Partly because it is tempting to ignore our ignorance, and partly because powerful interests make short-term fortunes that they spend convincing us that we should believe. And that, to me, is the real takeaway from this week's thought experiment. Even though an autogovernment could certainly help us model complexity and act towards agreed-upon goals, we must never mistake such contingent knowledge for complete clairvoyance.

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Thought Experiment 92: Autogovernment

5/8/2017

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Totally more popular than 95% of current politicians.

Ah, utopian fantasies. The key ingredient of many a philosophical thought experiment. If only this one could come true...

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It is crazy to think that in the bad old days, ministers who perhaps knew very little about economics were trusted to make important decisions about such matters as spending and taxation. It was some improvement when the power to set interest rates was transferred to central bankers. But the real breakthrough came when computers became good enough to manage the economy more efficiently than people. The supercomputer Greenspan Two, for example, ran the US economy for twenty years, during which time growth was constant and above the long-term average; there were no price bubbles or crashes; and unemployment stayed low.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the leader in the race for the White House, according to all the (computer conducted and highly accurate) opinion polls is another computer—or at least someone promising to let the computer make all the decisions. Bentham, as it is known, will be able to determine the effects of all policies on the general happiness of the population. Its supporters claim it will effectively remove humans from politics altogether. And because computers have no character flaws or vested interests, Bentham will be a vast improvement on the politicians it would replace. So far, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have come up with a persuasive counter-argument.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 274.
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What do you think? Do you have any knee-jerk reactions to such a scenario? And do you think that depends on your prior personal experiences using Windows, Apple, Unix, or Google computers? I'll be back on Friday with my thoughts on this kind of governance.

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Response to Thought Experiment 91: No One Gets Hurt

5/5/2017

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Sexy man on a deserted beach?

Only ten more thought experiments to go! Unfortunately, this week's experiment is more of a question for Dear Abby than a deep philosophical issue, but that doesn't mean I can't offer more than her typical "sound, compassionate advice, delivered with the straightforward style of a good friend." Let's remind ourselves of the issue at hand.

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Scarlett could not believe her luck. For as long as she could remember, Brad Depp had been her heartthrob. Now, amazingly, she had stumbled across his secluded holiday home in the Bahamas, which not even the paparazzi knew about.
What is more, when Brad saw the solitary walker on the beach, he had offered her a drink, and as they talked he turned out to be as charming as she had imagined. And then he admitted that he had got a bit lonely these last few weeks, and although, because of his lifestyle, it would have to remain a secret, he would very much like it if she were to spend the night with him.
There was just one problem: Scarlett was married to a man she very much loved. But what you don't know can't hurt you, and he would never know. She would get a night of fantasy and Brad would get a little comfort. Everyone would be either as they were or richer for the experience. No one would suffer. With so much to gain and nothing to lose, what earthly reason could there be for Scarlett to resist Brad's fabulous come-to-bed eyes?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 271.
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Okay, so we're talking about secret adultery here. Scarlett is no Hester Prynne so she won't have to wear a big red 'A' on her chest. But are there other problems we can see with her desires? This is a website about evolutionary philosophy and the fiction that it inspires, so let's consider the experiment using all three of those subjects.

1. Evolution
We humans are a "K-selection" species that has evolved to invest heavily in child rearing, as opposed to "r-selection" species which go for quantity over quality. Such K species "display traits associated with living at densities close to carrying capacity and typically are strong competitors in such crowded niches and invest more heavily in fewer offspring, each of which has a relatively high probability of surviving to adulthood." Although we've used our big brains, culture, and technology to push past the normal boundaries for carrying capacity, and contraception means sex is no longer just for reproduction, those are very recent events in evolutionary terms so we still carry a host of "side effects" from our evolutionary history. Among these is the fact that sexual intercourse floods our bodies and brains with chemicals that promote pair bonding. While I often argue for using rational thinking to redirect short-term biological urges towards behaviors that are beneficial in the long-term, we can't completely overcome our biological heritage so some basic emotional reactions will always remain. In this case, this is why jealousy and the taboo against adultery remains strong in societies around the world and why polyamory (usually described as ethical non-monogamy) is something that only seems to work in theory (as far as I know) for any extended population or stretch of time. Scarlett may rationally think she can have an intimate physical encounter with Brad without bringing any emotional baggage on board, but that's unlikely and so therefore something she needs to consider.

2. Philosophy
Making moral decisions requires consideration of the past, the present, and the future. Judgments are made about people's intentions, actions, and the consequences of those actions. In the field of philosophy, I see these three foci as distinct concerns of the three main camps of moral philosophers: virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequentialism/utilitarianism. In this thought experiment, Scarlett is arguing that her unvirtuous actions will remain a secret so they will have no consequences. How do I know the consensual sex between Scarlett and Brad is unvirtuous? Because in this case, Scarlett knows she has to hide it from her partner. So, even though the night of fantasy may not have direct consequences for her partner, the evolutionary heritage discussed above means that the intentions and actions will likely affect Scarlett directly (and then her partner indirectly). This is especially likely given that Scarlett knows that some part of her actions would be wrong and she will therefore be subject to feelings of guilt eventually. That brings me to the third part of my analysis.

3. Fiction
In my Response to Thought Experiment 75: The Ring of Gyges, I wrote about why people wouldn't all act horribly evil if they were granted the power of invisibility, which is very similar to the situation in this thought experiment where Scarlett's infidelity would be invisible to her partner. In that previous post, I mentioned Raskolnikov's inner turmoil in Crime and Punishment so let's look at a passage from that novel as a classic illustration of the fate that likely awaits Scarlett.

(As a brief setup, this passage comes soon after the main character, Raskolnikov, has murdered a mean old woman so he could take her money to pay off some debts and continue his virtuous work. Raskolnikov happens to get called to the police station for a trivial matter about those debts the day after the murder and he's questioned there by a lieutenant named Ilya Petrovich. Raskolnikov confesses to him about the trivial matter, but keeps the murder to himself. Barely.)

Raskolnikov fancied that after his confession the clerk had become more casual and contemptuous with him, but—strangely—he suddenly felt decidedly indifferent to anyone's possible opinion, and this change occurred somehow in a moment, an instant. If he had only cared to reflect a little, he would of course have been surprised that he could have spoken with them as he had a minute before, and even thrust his feelings upon them. And where had these feelings come from? On the contrary, if the room were now suddenly filled not with policemen but with his foremost friends, even then, he thought, he would be unable to find a single human word for them, so empty had his heart suddenly become. A dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul. It was not the abjectness of his heart's outpourings before Ilya Petrovich, nor the abjectness of the lieutenant's triumph over him, that suddenly overturned his heart. Oh, what did he care now about his own meanness, about all these vanities, lieutenants, German women, proceedings, offices, and so on and so forth! Even if he had been sentenced to be burned at that moment, he would not have stirred, and would probably not have listened very attentively to the sentence. What was taking place in him was totally unfamiliar, new, sudden, never before experienced. Not that he understood it, but he sensed clearly, with all the power of sensation, that it was no longer possible for him to address these people in the police station, not only with heartfelt effusions, as he had just done, but in any way at all, and had they been his own brothers and sisters, and not police lieutenants, there would still have been no point in addressing them, in whatever circumstances of life. Never until that minute had he experienced such a strange and terrible sensation. And most tormenting of all was that it was more a sensation than an awareness, an idea; a spontaneous sensation, the most tormenting of any he had yet experienced in his life. (Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knopf Paperback edition , 1992, pp. 103-104.)

Although murder is (presumably) a far more affecting crime than adultery, this is the sort of reaction Scarlett would surely feel as a consequence of her going through with the tryst. If you've read my post on What's Causing These Emotions, you might remember that an important theory on this subject comes from cognitive psychology which says emotions are reactions to cognitive appraisals. Somewhere in his conscious or unconscious thinking, Raskolnikov knows he did wrong and so a "tormenting sensation" of guilt arises in him. Scarlett knows beforehand that an adulterous night would be wrong, so she too would be afflicted with this kind of torment. We've all seen sitcoms or movies where an adulterous partner confesses his or her actions to their ignorant partner, only to be told they acted selfishly to reduce their own pain and spread it to another. Now we see why. And hopefully can do better if we are ever tempted by someone on our laminated list...

What do you think? Are there any other reasons Scarlett shouldn't go through with it? Or maybe you think she should? Let me know in the comments below. Only a few opportunities left to do so!

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Thought Experiment 91: No One Gets Hurt

5/1/2017

3 Comments

Oh I could just wax on about those eyes all night long.

If you want to answer this week's thought experiment in secret, I wouldn't blame you...

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Scarlett could not believe her luck. For as long as she could remember, Brad Depp had been her heartthrob. Now, amazingly, she had stumbled across his secluded holiday home in the Bahamas, which not even the paparazzi knew about.
What is more, when Brad saw the solitary walker on the beach, he had offered her a drink, and as they talked he turned out to be as charming as she had imagined. And then he admitted that he had got a bit lonely these last few weeks, and although, because of his lifestyle, it would have to remain a secret, he would very much like it if she were to spend the night with him.
There was just one problem: Scarlett was married to a man she very much loved. But what you don't know can't hurt you, and he would never know. She would get a night of fantasy and Brad would get a little comfort. Everyone would be either as they were or richer for the experience. No one would suffer. With so much to gain and nothing to lose, what earthly reason could there be for Scarlett to resist Brad's fabulous come-to-bed eyes?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 271.
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So what do you think? Will no one really suffer here? Would you accept the offer? Would you want your partner to? I'll be back on Friday to give my answer...as long as my wife will let me.

3 Comments

Thought Experiment 95: The Problem of Evil

Response to Thought Experiment 94: The Sorites Tax

Thought Experiment 94: The Sorites Tax

Response to Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

Thought Experiment 93: Zombies

Response to Thought Experiment 92: Autogovernment

Thought Experiment 92: Autogovernment

Response to Thought Experiment 91: No One Gets Hurt

Thought Experiment 91: No One Gets Hurt

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