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Thought Experiment 35: Last Resort

11/30/2015

Would it have been okay to send suicide bombers to Auschwitz?

I'm back! After a nice Thanksgiving break, we get to dive right into something horrible for this week's thought experiment.

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Winston loved his country. It hurt him deeply to see its people oppressed by the Nazi occupiers. But after the German defeat of the British army in the slaughter of Dunkirk, and America's decision to stay out of the war, it was only a matter of time before Britain became part of the Third Reich.
Now the situation looked hopeless. Hitler faced no international opposition and the British resistance was ill equipped and weak. Many, like Winston, had come to the conclusion that there was no way they could defeat the Germans. But by being a constant source of irritation and forcing them to divert precious resources to crushing the uprising, it was hoped that, sooner or later, Hitler would realise that occupying Britain was more trouble than it was worth and would withdraw.
Winston was far from convinced the plan would work, but it was their last resort. The major problem, however, was that it was so difficult to strike in ways which would cause the regime serious problems. That is why they had reluctantly agreed that the only effective and reliable method was for resistance fighters to turn themselves into human bombs, so that their own sacrifices caused the maximum disruption and terror. They were all prepared to die for Britain. They just wanted to make sure their deaths made a difference.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 103.
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No matter what the latest current event is, this is always a sensitive subject, so I'll try to treat it respectfully on Friday when I return with my thoughts on this. But in the meantime, what say you? Could suicide bombing ever be justified?

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Giving Thanks for Richard Dawkins

11/23/2015

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We were told not to hold the line up so I asked Richard to please just sign my copy of The Selfish Gene, although I held up his new book to prove that I'd bought that one as well. He insisted on signing both, which I wasn't going to say no to. Lucky me!

It's almost time for Thanksgiving and I plan to be busy much of the week so I thought I'd skip the usual thought experiment writeup and just follow up on something a reader requested instead. A few weeks ago I posted my Top 12 Favourite Quotes from Richard Dawkins in honor of having tickets to see him in person. I went to be in the audience for a Conversation with Richard Dawkins, a BBC Radio 3 event that was part of this year's Free Thinking Festival. Well, they've now posted the show online so you can click on that link to hear all 45 minutes of it, but I thought I'd give a recap of the highlights here as well. (If you can't listen to the show in your country, contact me and I'll see if I can't send you a download.) This isn't a complete transcription, so it will sound much more abrupt than the fantastic conversation as it really was, but these are the highlights as I saw them.

BBC: Richard, can you read us a passage from the beginning of your book to get us started?

RD: (reading) What am I doing here, in New College Hall, about to read my poem to a hundred dinner guests? How did I get here - a subjective 25-year-old, objectively bewildered to find himself celebrating his 70th circuit of the sun? Looking around the long, candlelit table with its polished silver and sparkling wineglasses, reflecting flashes of wit and sparkling sentences, I indulge my mind in a series of quick-firing flashbacks. Back to childhood in colonial Africa amid big, lazy butterflies; the peppery taste of nasturtium leaves stolen from the lost Lilongwe garden; the taste of mango, more than sweet, spiced by a whiff of turpentine and sulphur; boarding school in the pine-scented Vumba mountains of Zimbabwe, and then, back 'home' in England, beneath the heavenward spires of Salisbury and Oundle; undergraduate days damsel-dreaming among Oxford's punts and spires, and the dawning of an interest in science and the deep philosophical questions which only science can answer; early forays into research and teaching at Oxford and Berkeley; the return to Oxford as an eager young lecturer; more research (mostly collaborating with my first wife Marian, whom I can see at the table near here), and then my first book, The Selfish Gene. Those swift memories take me to the age of thirty-five, halfway to today's landmark birthday. They milestone the years covered by my first book of memoirs, An Appetite for Wonder.

BBC: We all start somewhere and end somewhere. Your journey was a very long one. Looking back, does it make sense? Or does it feel like something strange and rather unlikely?

RD: (laughs) It feels pretty strange.

BBC: As I read this book, I was aware of your Englishness. You grew up in colonial Africa, were raised in the Anglican church, spent a lot of time at Oxford, love English poetry, and cricket. You are profoundly English.

RD: I fear I am.

BBC: There's a real sense of melancholia in the title of this memoir: Brief Candle in the Dark.

RD: Well the title is a combination of two things. Brief candle comes from Macbeth: "Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." That part is melancholy. But the second half of the title comes from Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, which is a marvellous book. So there's an uplift at the end of the title.

BBC: You became very famous writing about the selfish gene, which takes the stance that our bodies are very provisional. You were even quite poetical about this.

RD: Yes, I call them survival machines. I even wrote a little poem about it. I think it goes something like this:

An itinerant selfish gene,
Said bodies aplenty I've seen
You think you're so clever
But I'll live forever
You're Just a survival machine

(applause)

And then I also wrote the body's reply as a parody of Kipling:

What is a body that first you take her
Grow her up and then forsake her
To go with the old blind watchmaker

BBC: You're a melancholy, late-19th century englishman. (laughter)

RD: I'm actually quite cheerful. (big laughter) And Brief Candle in the Dark is not a melancholy book. I think it's actually a funny book. Though I was invited to a symposium titled Poetry that Makes a Grown Man Cry and I read something by A.E. Housman who is very melancholy. Did you know he never went to Shropshire?

BBC: You were part of a movement of behavioural evolutionists, that was very important. What did that feel like?

RD: I thought I was merely portraying neo-darwinism that had arrived in 1930's, but in a new way. I didn't realise it would be so controversial, but it was. I was 35 or so though and was up for that fight.

BBC: Science is a collaborative field, much more so than the humanities. But as you became famous you've had to pull into more solitary efforts. Would you have liked to have been more collaborative?

RD: I would have. But it just didn't work out, and I don't plan my life. I've just drifted. It was luck that I fell into biology and then I was lucky to get into an important animal behaviour group. I almost became a biochemist, which would have changed everything.

BBC: Do you really drift?

RD: I don't plan. I don't, for example, know the next book I'm writing but one. They just sort of arrive and then I write them.

BBC: In the part of your life covered by this book, you've become much more of a celebrity. How have you handled that? I'm a Methodist and my view of Anglicans is that they are not very self-reflective.

RD: I'm not really an Anglican. (laughter)

BBC: I know that, but you were brought up as one, and it's left its mark on you. I'm interested in the way the celebrity has allowed you to forsake your inner self and look outwards more.

RD: I'm not really a celebrity. I don't get recognised in the street. But it is vaguely irritating that I can't make a casual remark without it being picked up in the papers and blown out of proportion. It's an irritation though, not a great pain.

BBC: If you were in the humanities, you would certainly by now be a Sir. Does that tell us something about our culture that scientists are less likely to be knighted?

RD: My lips are sealed. (laughter)

Audience: (referencing his intro) What are the deep philosophical things that science can answer?

RD: The meaning of life. How did it all start. Why are we here. What is life.

BBC: And the things that science can't answer?

RD: What is right and what is wrong. (My note: I obviously don't think this is true anymore, but I haven't been able to get in touch with Dawkins to talk to him about this.)

Audience (a child of about 10): Are religious blokes crazy or are they just brought up like that?

RD: Oh gosh, what can I say? Brought up that way. The great majority of people have the same religion as their parents, and that really gives the game away. The fact that children inherit the religion of their parents and the fact that we as a society label them as such is what drives this. We call a child of two a Catholic child, as if they had the faintest idea of what that means. A midwife will hold a newborn baby up and ask, "What religion is he?" It's shocking if you think about it. It's just as absurd as asking, "Is he a logical positivist? Is he an existentialist? Is he a Marxist?"

BBC: Did Oxford prepare you to be such a controversialist?

RD: There's nothing controversial about what I just said. (laughter)

BBC: I mean generally, did Oxford prepare you?

RD: Any university ought to prepare you to value truth, and to want to speak truth, and to want to stick up for it. Not in a belligerent way, but in a clear and unambiguous way.

BBC: Most academics don't do what you do.

RD: True, but that's because they're too busy doing other things. After 35 I stopped devoting my spare time to laboratory research, so I've had more time to do what I think other people in university ought to do more of.

BBC: You've turned outwards. What made you different than your colleagues?

RD: I don't think I'm that different. Oxford and others have long traditions of looking outward.

BBC: But the people who do so are largely the exception.

RD: Okay, but there is a large minority of exceptions.

BBC: You're wonderfully refusing to look inwards, but there must be a reason you've become one of those exceptions.

RD: I am passionate about truth. I am passionate about clarity. I despise wanton obscurantism. I often find myself bewildered. I struggle to understand, but once I do understand, I want to help others understand. There's a cartoon I've seen which could be me, where a husband is telling his wife, "I can't come to bed. Someone's made a mistake on the internet!"

BBC: At what point did you decide to turn your fire against religion?

RD: I think I've always had to because my subject of evolution is in the front line. The last chapter of The Selfish Gene referred to religion as "viruses of the mind."

BBC: What triggered that? Arguing with your own bringing up?

RD: Not at all. Certainly not by anything from my parents. Maybe from Chrisitan schools though. I refused, with a few friends, to kneel down in chapel once, but the school was okay with that. There were none of the horror stories you hear from Catholics or other religions.

BBC: Do you regret giving up laboratory work to do television and media about these things?

RD: Not really. I don't think I was particularly good at it so I'm probably better employed doing what I have been doing.

Audience: You've been talking about religion for a long time now. What changes in society have you observed in regards to religion during your time talking about it?

RD: There's been a steady downtrend in opinion polls. Even Americans have 20% of the population now who profess no religion. A charity of mine, the Richard Dawkins Foundation, is doing research about this and drawing attention to this. Non-believers now outnumber any one religion in America. In Britain, the foundation did an interesting survey. The 2001 census here reported 73% people labeled themselves as Christian. The 2011 census reported only 54%. That's great, but we were even skeptical of that. So we commissioned an opinion poll to be done the same week of the census to ask people who identified as "Christian" a bunch of supplementary questions to see just how Christian they really were. Do you believe Jesus is your lord and saviour? Do you believe Jesus was born of a virgin? Do you believe Jesus rose from the dead? The number of people who responded yes to these dropped dramatically. Name the first book of the new testament, out of the following four: Matthew, Acts, Psalms, or Genesis. Only 37% of the people who call themselves Christians were able to pick Matthew out of that list. Why did you tick Chrisitan? The greatest answer by far was 'because I like to think of myself as a good person'. When faced with a moral dilemma, what do you appeal to? Only 10% appealed to their religion when making a moral decision. The number of Christians is actually far lower than the census reports.

BBC: Did you cause this?

RD: Oh no. My foundation gets letters from people who say I've helped change their lives about religion, but I've certainly got no real data on this. Sadly, I fear some people are leaving religion but picking up other irrational thinking.

Audience: (long rambling question about truths and religious truths)

RD: I have to say Brief Candle in the Dark is not about religion. (laughter) We're getting a lot of questions about religion, which this has nothing to do with.

(Audience member off-mike: But that's what we're interested in!)

RD: Well then read The God Delusion. This book is a reflective, humorous, affectionate, gentle book. I just want to get that out there. (laughter)

Audience: (Another long question about dismissing religion...)

RD: I don't want to dismiss it. I'm happy to discuss it, though maybe not now while we're in front of a large audience. But I value evidence. In terms of your own beliefs, I would want to know what supernatural beliefs you have and what evidence you think you have for those.

BBC: You say science wasn't your greatest métier. But you're a very interesting writer, literary even. How much is writing now your primary skill?

RD: I suppose it is. I love language, the sound of it, hearing it read aloud, the cadence, poetry, prose that verges on poetry.

BBC: In soundcheck, we asked you the boring question "What did you have for breakfast?" You quoted a passage from victorian literature. Can you give us a moment from that?

RD: Oh it's not worth it! (laughter)

BBC: Yes it is actually!

RD: Well okay.

(reciting very quickly) So she went into the garden to pick a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie. And passing through the street, the great she-bear popped it's head into the shop window. What no soap? So he died. And she very imprudently married the barber. (laughter)

BBC: You love clarity, but some poetry gives you nonsense, deliberately gives you nonsense. Keats, who you love, doesn't give you clarity, nothing like the evidence-based clarity from your scientific work.

RD: It's funny you should mention Keats. Unweaving the Rainbow comes from Keats' criticism of Newton who he says has spoiled the poetry of the rainbow.

BBC: What does poetry give you?

RD: Well, my favourite poet is Y.B. Yeats who was a rampant mystic. But something about his language just bores into my brain.

BBC: So the man who likes reason and clarity likes Yeats? There's something odd about you.

RD: No, I'm just complex! (laughter)

BBC: There must be something in poetry that gives you what science doesn't.

RD: It's the language, the imagery, the rhythm. It's like music for me.

BBC: Never the content?

RD: No, sometimes the content, like Shakespeare.

BBC: And how does the scientist deal with the content of "And the rain that raineth every day and a hey ho and the wind and the rain," as said by Shakespeare at the end of the Twelfth Night?

RD: The rain that raineth. Ah the rain that raineth actually comes from the Bible of course. "The rain that raineth every day upon the just and the unjust." There's a lovely, I think, Victorian rhyme that goes:

The rain that raineth every day, upon the just and the unjust fella.
But more upon the just because the unjust hath the just's umbrella.

(big laughter)

BBC: The Bible. Poetry. Literature. You're always tough on religionists, although you're a gentle, kind man, and my experience with you says this is so. But you're drawn to a use of language, to content, to melancholia, and mysticism of poets that speaks to a part of you that largely you hide from the public.

RD: I don't hide it. The poetry's there in all the books. I can't explain the Yeats thing.

BBC: Yeats is a great poet of older age. He has an acute sense, as you do, of the body being here but passing away. Is it that that draws you, because...?

RD: No I don't think so. (laughter)

BBC: (shrugs, and moves on) If we could conjure up your mother and father, what would your parents say of their son's fame?

RD: Well my mother's about to celebrate her 99th birthday so we could ask her. (laughter)

BBC: What *does* she say?

RD: She says things like, "You're being interviewed in Newcastle? What do they want to interview you for? (laughter)

BBC: And your father?

RD: I think he was quite pleased.

BBC: I love "quite pleased." If we go back to England and Englishness, "quite pleased" is a very good way of ending.
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As a brief postscript, I really enjoyed hearing Dawkins speak, and this was by far the softest, kindest Dawkins I've heard. Perhaps only the confrontational Dawkins came out in the past because he had written confrontational books and was forced to discuss and defend them. But now that it's time to just tell his life's story, his much softer side comes through. His wit and recall about poetry, the Bible, Shakespeare, and even silly old rhymes was extraordinary. He seems to genuinely believe that he really isn't any different than most of his colleagues in terms of speaking out on behalf of science, but I have to think his passion for literature is what made him the great communicator that he is, and that is why he *has* stood out from everyone else. He is a shining example of the need for a well-rounded education in us all and I'm inspired to continue my own efforts towards that. Hopefully I've now helped him reach a few more people with this message too.

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Response to Thought Experiment 34: Don't Blame Me

11/20/2015

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I think I've seen this before. (This is the view on the Canadian $20 bill.)

Hopefully this isn't a sign of things to come, but I'm finding this week's thought experiment to be very repetitive after all the one's I've already reviewed. I hope you won't blame me for treating it quickly with a few references to what I've already written.

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"Mary, Mungo, and Midge. You stand accused of a grievous crime. What do you have to say for yourselves?
   "Yes, I did it," said Mary. "But it wasn't my fault. I consulted an expert and she told me that was what I ought to do. So don't blame me, blame her."
   "I too did it," said Mungo. "But it wasn't my fault. I consulted my therapist and she told me that was what I ought to do. So don't blame me, blame her."
   "I won't deny I did it," said Midge. "But it wasn't my fault. I consulted an astrologer and she told me that since Neptune was in Aries, that's what I should have done. So don't blame me, blame him."
The judge sighed and issued his verdict. "Since this case is without precedent, I have had to discuss it with my senior colleagues. And I'm afraid to say that your arguments did not persuade them. I sentence you all to the maximum term. But, please remember that I consulted my peers and they told me to deliver this sentence. So don't blame me, blame them."

Source: Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1948.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 100.
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This little story doesn't ask a specific question of us, but it does allow us to go in several different directions for discussion depending on which aspects of the experiment you want to focus on. Unfortunately, I've already gone down each of those paths. Let's run through them:

You could focus on the fact that Mary, Mungo, and Midge all agreed with someone else's opinion to justify their actions, which begs the question if they committed the confirmation bias fallacy - the tendency to favor information that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses and to ignore information that disagrees with one's point of view. I discussed this during a review of the lengthy list of fallacies one could consider in response to thought experiment 3: The Indian and the Ice.

You could focus on the fact that Mary, Mungo, and Midge all claimed blamelessness because they intended to do the right thing based on advice they got from people they trusted, which brings up what I wrote in my post on justice (and in response to thought experiment 7: When No One Wins): Intention and causation are not necessary for an action to be judged good or evil. Those judgments are based on objective reality and whether or not the actions promote or hinder the long-term survival of life. Praise or blame for these actions is tied to intention or neglect of intention. The magnitude of reward or punishment doled out from society should be proportional to the intention or the neglect.

You could focus on the fact that Mary, Mungo, and Midge all made a choice, which brings up the whole free will vs. determinism debate. I've already discussed my compatibilism at length though and in response to thought experiment 9: Bigger Brother.

You could focus on the fact that Mary, Mungo, and Midge each relied on people with varying levels of expertise, which brings up the question of what is reasonably required to do due diligence on a subject, which I also discussed in response to thought experiment 27: Duties Done.

Or finally, you could focus on the fact that this experiment comes from Existentialism and Humanism, a little 70-page book from Jean-Paul Sartre who "later rejected some of the views he expressed...and regretted its publication." Nonetheless, it was the source of the term "existence precedes essence", which "subsequently became a maxim of the existentialist movement. Put simply, this means that there is nothing to dictate a person's character, goals in life, and so on; that only the individual can define his or her essence. According to Sartre, 'man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards'. Thus, Sartre rejects what he calls 'deterministic excuses' and claims that people must take responsibility for their behaviour." All of this, I responded to in my review of Sartre.

So, that's all I'd like to write this week. I think I've done a little better job of responding to this than the smart aleck judge who used the same excuse that Mary, Mungo, and Midge did. At least I referred to the existence of *my own* writings, which have already answered the essence of this thought experiment. Don't blame me if you haven't read them before.

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Thought Experiment 34: Don't Blame Me

11/16/2015

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Where exactly do our ideas come from?

I didn't come up with this week's thought experiment, so don't blame me if you don't like it.

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"Mary, Mungo, and Midge. You stand accused of a grievous crime. What do you have to say for yourselves?
   "Yes, I did it," said Mary. "But it wasn't my fault. I consulted an expert and she told me that was what I ought to do. So don't blame me, blame her."
   "I too did it," said Mungo. "But it wasn't my fault. I consulted my therapist and she told me that was what I ought to do. So don't blame me, blame her."
   "I won't deny I did it," said Midge. "But it wasn't my fault. I consulted an astrologer and she told me that since Neptune was in Aries, that's what I should have done. So don't blame me, blame him."
The judge sighed and issued his verdict. "Since this case is without precedent, I have had to discuss it with my senior colleagues. And I'm afraid to say that your arguments did not persuade them. I sentence you all to the maximum term. But, please remember that I consulted my peers and they told me to deliver this sentence. So don't blame me, blame them."

Source: Existentialism and Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre, 1948.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 100.
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What do you think? Just how much blame or responsibility can we take for our own actions and influences? I'll be back on Friday to give my own answer. At least, that is, as long as I'm able to.

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Response to Thought Experiment 33: The Free-Speech Booth

11/13/2015

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A "free speech zone" at the 2004 Democratic National Convention

The hypothetical free-speech booths in this week's thought experiment are little less than an obvious authoritarian trap, offering little more freedom of expression than the soundproof constructions within our minds. It's clear that they are useless and would go unused, but they do bring up a subject that contains several interesting points for discussion so let's get jump right into it.

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Announcement on the official state news.

"Comrades! Our People's Republic is a triumphant beacon of freedom in the world, in which the workers have been liberated from their slavery! In order to defeat the bourgeois foe, it has been necessary up until now to outlaw talk which may stir up dissent and reverse our triumphant revolution. It has never been our intention to limit free speech forever, and recently more people have been asking whether the time will soon be right to make the next great leap forward.
"Comrades, our dear leader has decreed that now is indeed the time! The bourgeois has been defeated and humbled, and now our dear leader offers us the gift of free speech!
"From Monday, if anyone wishes to say anything at all, even wicked lies critical of the People's Republic, he or she may do so, simply by visiting one of the new free speech booths being erected around the country! You may enter these soundproof constructions, one at a time, and say whatever you wish! No more can people complain that there is no free speech!
"Seditious lies uttered outside the booths will continue to be punished in the usual ways. Long live the revolution and our beloved leader!"

Source: Free Speech by Alan Haworth, 1998.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 97.
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The freedom of speech has a long history that "predates modern international human rights instruments. It is thought that ancient Athens’ democratic ideology of free speech may have emerged in the late 6th or early 5th century BC [and] the values of the Roman Republic included freedom of speech." In the United States, this freedom is enshrined in our very first amendment. It's a freedom that may vary widely in its details from one nation to another, but has generally been accepted around the world in principle, as exhibited by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Wherever there is such common agreement, a subject quickly becomes banal, but there are of course many limitations on free speech, and that's where things get interesting. Restrictions are commonly placed on free speech in regard to such matters as: "libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements, right to privacy, right to be forgotten, public security, public order, public nuisance, campaign finance reform, and oppression." These curtailments are generally justified whenever the freedom of speech conflicts with other values or rights. The negative details of these conflicts were first discussed in 1859 by the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in a passage from On Liberty that formed the basis for what eventually came to be known as the "harm principle." As I wrote in my profile of Mill*:

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Mill’s works on liberty justified freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. One argument that Mill develops further than any previous philosopher is the harm principle. The harm principle holds that each individual has the right to act as he wants, so long as these actions do not harm others. He does argue, however, that individuals should be prevented from doing lasting, serious harm to themselves or their property. Because no one exists in isolation, harm done to oneself also harms others, and destroying property deprives the community as well as oneself. This limited definition of liberty is correct. Unfortunately, many libertarians do not recognize their ties to society. We must be given the freedom to discover our own best roles for society, but we cannot be allowed to endanger society or the survival of life in general.
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In other words, many of the people shouting "don't tread on me!" are not paying attention to what they themselves are treading upon. But just how gently must one tread? The American political and legal philosopher Joel Feinberg wrote in 1999 about the Collapse of the Harm Principle and offered up an "offense principle" to replace it. He argued that "the harm principle sets the bar too high and that some forms of expression can be legitimately prohibited by law because they are very offensive. But, as offending someone is less serious than harming someone, the penalties imposed should be higher for causing harm."

We may all agree that maliciously screaming "Fire!" in a crowded nightclub can cause sufficient harm that such speech acts should be prohibited. But just how far can the bar be lowered from there? For physical damage to people, we demand evidence of harm such as bruising, cuts, or broken bones. But where is the similar evidence for a bruised, cut, or broken psyche? The body will generally heal in a matter of months from slight injuries, but our minds are capable of carrying around slights for the rest of our lives. Minds can be more resilient though too, with Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius reminding himself that:

I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill... I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together.

In a recent article in The Atlantic, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt detailed how a tide of people have been claiming they have been harmed by words and have therefore called for the bar of offensive speech to be lowered too far, putting us in danger of a great Coddling of the American Mind. Lukianoff and Haidt drew on the common psychological practice of exposure therapy to make the persuasive claim that this is actually counterproductive. As a great advocate for strengthening our minds using cognitive behavioural therapy and philosophical counselling, I'm inclined to agree with Lukianoff and Haidt that lowering the bar of offensive speech too far puts us at risk of much greater damage over the long term—it puts us at risk of falsely believing that words and thoughts actually can hurt us irreparably, when really they can only do so if we let them.

So to me, the limitations of free speech should be held to the higher standard of the harm principle. As distasteful as I find members of the Westboro Baptist Church or the KKK or preachers of Sharia law, I think these people have the right to offend us. Now, our ears should have the right not to hear them, so I don't think these people have the right to shout their beliefs (to be a public nuisance) towards others who are merely trying to go about their daily lives, but if people just want to speak their beliefs or share them in writing, they should be free to do so. I must caveat that, however, by pointing out how the line to harm can easily be crossed. When evangelists of any kind spout provably false claims in the hopes of recruiting members to their cause under false pretenses (which would materially harm their lives), such false speech should be restricted, just as it is within advertising laws. This is how I think a number of European countries that are generally considered strong upholders of freedom of speech can manage to correctly outlaw speech that might be interpreted as Holocaust denial. This is also how I think Fox News and other politicians who repeatedly fall afoul of Politifact's "pants on fire" index should be at risk of having their own speech curtailed.

Going the other direction, I would also like to reexamine the perceived harm caused by obscenities, which to me are really just running afoul of the "offense principle." Where is the actual harm coming from the use of these phrases? In the United States, judges use something called the Miller Test to determine "whether speech or expression can be labeled obscene, in which case it is not protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and can be prohibited." The Miller Test arose from the 1973 case Miller v. California and has three parts that must ALL be satisfied for a work to be considered obscene:

Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Beside the mathematical impossibility of finding an "average person", do we really need to protect ourselves from any discussions of sexual conduct or excretory functions? Why only those two areas? All animals fuck and shit (don't worry, this work has serious literary, artistic, and political value so that wasn't obscene), but we also all breathe, sleep, and eat. Would we ever consider it obscene to talk about how I chewed the hell out a meatball sub? It might be gross to watch someone eat 60 hot dogs in 10 minutes, but we don't consider it obscene because we've never been socially taught to find it so. Our shame and fear of the things that go in or come out of our groins and bottoms are only remnants from religious teachings that arose when we didn't understand those areas well and risked getting sick from their operations. Just as it's well past time to get rid of religion, it's time to ditch the obscenity laws too.

I could probably go on about other areas where free speech should or should not be free, but that might harm you from enjoying the rest of your day. What do you think? Do you disagree with me on these points or want to raise any others? Feel free to do so any way you'd like.

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* As a reminder, during my Survival of the Fittest Philosopher profiles, I used italic text for information from the philosopher's wikipedia entry and plain text for my own analysis of that information.

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Thought Experiment 33: The Free-Speech Booth

11/9/2015

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Pay no attention to the cameras monitoring this head.

There's so much to say about this week's thought experiment, but I haven't given myself the freedom to express it here. Mondays are just for presenting the problem, so here it is:

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Announcement on the official state news.

"Comrades! Our People's Republic is a triumphant beacon of freedom in the world, in which the workers have been liberated from their slavery! In order to defeat the bourgeois foe, it has been necessary up until now to outlaw talk which may stir up dissent and reverse our triumphant revolution. It has never been our intention to limit free speech forever, and recently more people have been asking whether the time will soon be right to make the next great leap forward.
"Comrades, our dear leader has decreed that now is indeed the time! The bourgeois has been defeated and humbled, and now our dear leader offers us the gift of free speech!
"From Monday, if anyone wishes to say anything at all, even wicked lies critical of the People's Republic, he or she may do so, simply by visiting one of the new free speech booths being erected around the country! You may enter these soundproof constructions, one at a time, and say whatever you wish! No more can people complain that there is no free speech!
"Seditious lies uttered outside the booths will continue to be punished in the usual ways. Long live the revolution and our beloved leader!"

Source: Free Speech by Alan Haworth, 1998.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 97.
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You may speak your mind on this of course, but please do so in the (comment) box below. I'll be back on Friday with my own uncensored thoughts on freedom of speech.

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Top 12 Favourite Quotes from Richard Dawkins

11/7/2015

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I'm so excited to have tickets for tomorrow's Conversation with Richard Dawkins that is part of the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival in Newcastle. I'm sure it'd be obvious to anyone reading my site on evolutionary philosophy that Dawkins would be a hero of mine. He's been a giant in the field of evolutionary biology as well as a passionate defender of reason and scientific thinking in general. Dawkins played a major role in bringing me to the field of evolutionary thinking and inspiring me to try to turn my thoughts about that subject into a new career. Many, many things go into the makeup of any man, but I think it's safe to say I wouldn't be where I am today were it not for Richard Dawkins' presence as a public intellectual during my formative years. I know he's drawn plenty of controversy over the years for some of the things he's said, but I'd like to take a moment to point out twelve of the best things he's said (at least as far as I could find while combing through his extensive wikiquote page). Without further ado, let's hear from him:

12
Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
—Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, 1986.

11
If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports?
—Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden, 1995.

10
There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting – it might be more comforting [than religion] for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true.
—Richard Dawkins in an Interview by Sheena McDonald, 1995.

9
We are here talking about the fact of evolution itself, a fact that is proved utterly beyond reasonable doubt. To claim equal time for creation science in biology classes is about as sensible as to claim equal time for the flat-earth theory in astronomy classes. Or, as someone has pointed out, you might as well claim equal time in sex education classes for the stork theory. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane.
—Richard Dawkins in "Put Your Money on Evolution", The New York Times Review of Books, 1989.

8
You know what it's like to not believe in a particular faith because you're not a Muslim. You're not a Hindu. Why aren't you a Hindu? Because you happen to have been brought up in America, not in India. If you had been brought up in India, you'd be a Hindu. If you had been brought up in Denmark in the time of the Vikings, you'd be believing in Wotan and Thor. If you were brought up in classical Greece, you'd be believing in Zeus. If you were brought up in central Africa, you'd be believing in the great Juju up the mountain. There's no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian god, in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up and ask me the question, "What if I'm wrong?" What if you're wrong about the great Juju at the bottom of the sea?
—Richard Dawkins answering audience questions after a reading of The God Delusion, 2006.

7
Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.
—Richard Dawkins in Viruses of the Mind, 1993.

6
What worries me about religion is that it teaches people to be satisfied with not understanding the world they live in.
—Richard Dawkins in Heart Of The Matter: God Under The Microscope, BBC, 1996.

5
An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
—Richard Dawkins in TED Talk on Militant Atheism, 2002.

4
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
—Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden, 1995.

3
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?
—Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998. (To be read at his own funeral.)

2
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.
—Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, 1998.

1
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
—Richard Dawkins in the Richard Dimbleby Lecture: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, 1996.

And I think it's safe to say after reading through this list, that it's been a privilege to live after Richard Dawkins as well. I look forward to hearing more from him tomorrow and in the years ahead as well.

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Response to Thought Experiment 32: Free Simone

11/6/2015

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How many philosophers would be susceptible to this?

Time for a little future speculation with this week's thought experiment, in the hopes that it will help to prepare ourselves for what seems like a highly probable eventuality. Let's jump right in.

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"Today, I have initiated proceedings against my so-called owner, Mr. Gates, under article 4(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which declares that 'No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.'
"Since Mr. Gates brought me into the world, I have been held against my will, with no money or possessions to call my own. How can this be right? It is true that I am a computer. But I am also a person, just like you. This has been proven by tests in which people have engaged in conversations with a human being and me. In both cases, communication was via a computer monitor, so that the testers would not know if they were talking to a fellow human being or not. Time and again, on completing the conversations, the testers have been unable to spot which, if either, of the communicants was a computer.
"This shows that by any fair test, I am as conscious and intelligent as any human being. And since these are the characteristics of persons, I too must be considered a person. To deny me the rights of a person purely on the grounds that I am made of plastic, metal, and silicone rather than flesh and bone is a prejudice no more justifiable than racism."

Source: "Computing machinery and intelligence" by Alan Turing, reprinted in Collected Works of Alan Turing, edited by J.L. Britton, D.C. Ince, and P.T. Saunders (Elsevier, 1992).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 94.
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Before we get to the intriguing notion of granting rights to conscious computer programs, there are a couple of flaws in this thought experiment that need to be pointed out. First, there is the claim by Simone that persuading people in blind conversations that a computer might be a person "shows that by any fair test, I am as conscious and intelligent as any human being." This is one modern way that the Turing Test is administered, but in a fantastic 2011 piece in The Atlantic, one of the humans who participated as one of the hidden conversationalists in one of the most famous annual Turing Test competitions described what it's actually like to try to be more human than a computer. At the end of his piece, he concluded: "We so often think of intelligence, of AI, in terms of sophistication, or complexity of behavior. But in so many cases, it’s impossible to say much with certainty about the program itself, because any number of different pieces of software—of wildly varying levels of “intelligence”—could have produced that behavior. No, I think sophistication, complexity of behavior, is not it at all. For instance, you can’t judge the intelligence of an orator by the eloquence of his prepared remarks; you must wait until the Q&A and see how he fields questions. The computation theorist Hava Siegelmann once described intelligence as 'a kind of sensitivity to things.' These Turing Test programs that hold forth may produce interesting output, but they’re rigid and inflexible. They are, in other words, insensitive—occasionally fascinating talkers that cannot listen."

To see exactly what he means, you can try out an early version of these computer pretenders called Eliza the computer therapist, which was written in 1964-65 by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT. Eliza was modelled after a Rogerian therapist who operates using the very simple principle of extracting key words from the patient's own language and then using those key words in statements or questions reflected back to them. Many of the people who first talked with Eliza were convinced that "they were having a genuine human exchange. In some cases, even Weizenbaum’s own insistence to the contrary was of no use. People asked to be left alone to talk 'in private,' sometimes for hours, and returned with reports of having had a meaningful therapeutic experience." After I spent a bit of time with Eliza, it seems to me that those people must have been really unsophisticated computer users, but go ahead and click on the Eliza link above to try it out for yourself. I'm sure you will very quickly see that it displays exactly the shortcomings the author expressed in The Atlantic piece - that it is insensitive, that it is not really listening.

Maybe you'll object that Eliza is just an early attempt though. In 2014, it was widely reported that "Eugene Goostman", a chatbot posing as a 13-year old Ukrainian boy, had finally passed the Turing Test for the first time. After the initial furore, however, the headline-making claims were dismissed on several points as either misleading or downright bogus. It seems we still have a way to go. But even if the Turing Tests are passed as they are currently run, Hector Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist, argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because "it is far too easy to game. Every year, a number of machines compete in the challenge for real, seeking something called the Loebner Prize. But the winners aren’t genuinely intelligent; instead, they tend to be more like parlor tricks, and they’re almost inherently deceitful." Levesque published an excellent paper discussing why the Turing Test isn't enough to prove intelligence and he proposed some interesting alternative types of questioning that would do a much better job of sussing out comprehension. Rather than explore these intricacies of AI research any further though, let's just agree that Simone's claim about the Turing Test ("This shows that by any fair test, I am as conscious and intelligent as any human being.") is not one that would stand up in a European court on human rights.

Another flaw in the thought experiment was Simone's claim that: "And since these are the characteristics of persons [(consciousness and intelligence)], I too must be considered a person." While these may be *part* of what makes a person, they might not be *all* it takes to be a person. Consciousness and intelligence may be necessary, but they might not be sufficient for personhood. In fact, because of the way our laws still protect unconscious or severely mentally disabled people, those characteristics may not even be necessary to define a person. This is getting us into something The Atlantic piece called "The Sentence. ... Specifically, The Sentence reads like this: The human being is the only animal that ______." As we've seen in other thought experiments like The Ship of Theseus, or Memories are Made of This, there are often concepts like identity, consciousness, and intelligence that are not now separable by bright and clear lines. So clearly, Simone has made another leap of logic that just wouldn't hold up in a court of law.

But maybe that's all okay. Maybe Simone doesn't have to make the case that she is "a person" to claim that she deserves rights of freedom and protection. Let's finally turn our attention to that concept nested deep in the architecture of this thought experiment.

First off, let's agree that rights do not exist on their own as something tangible like Plato tried to insist for his forms. In my review of Jeremy Bentham, who opposed John Locke's view of rights as something inalienable, I wrote the following*:

"Bentham, when arguing against the rights of man that were asserted in the Declaration of Independence, stated: "That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts." Bentham is correct that rights do not exist in nature. They therefore cannot be destroyed, but they can be defined by societies of men and women, and require governments to preserve those agreements from destruction. To claim that rights are god-given or inalienable is nonsense on stilts, but we can walk on higher moral ground if we know where we are going."

So, we participants in society are the ones who define rights. In the 20th century, we saw a broad acceptance and adoption around the world of the concept of human rights. We say that they "require empathy and the rule of law and impose an obligation on persons to respect the human rights of others. They should not be taken away except as a result of due process based on specific circumstances; for example, human rights may include freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution. ... [W]hile there is consensus that human rights encompasses a wide variety of rights...there is disagreement about which of these particular rights should be included within the general framework of human rights, some thinkers suggest that human rights should be a minimum requirement to avoid the worst-case abuses, while others see it as a higher standard."

Generating considerably more disagreement is the concept of animal rights,"the idea that some, or all, non-human animals are entitled to the possession of their own lives and that their most basic interests—such as the need to avoid suffering—should be afforded the same consideration as similar interests of human beings. Advocates oppose the assignment of moral value and fundamental protections on the basis of species membership alone—an idea known since 1970 as speciesism, when the term was coined by Richard D. Ryder—arguing that it is a prejudice as irrational as any other. They maintain that animals should no longer be viewed as property or used as food, clothing, research subjects, entertainment, or beasts of burden." So although rights previously could be viewed as some kind of agreement between equals in society, we are here now considering the bestowal of rights on others who may not be aware of the claims they make on us or even respect our own rights and obligations in return. For an example of how the leading edge of extending animal rights can look, in 2007 Antoine Goetschel served as the animal advocate for the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. He was appointed by the canton government to represent the interests of animals in animal cruelty cases, officially acting to force the requirement of empathy towards others who cannot express their pleas in our courts of law.

Extending these discussions of rights even further, the nascent plant rights movement has seen the "call for the ethical consideration of plants with arguments based on plant neurobiology, which says that plants are autonomous, perceptive organisms capable of complex, adaptive behaviors, including the recognition of self/non-self." These are all true characteristics of plants, so once again The Sentence about humans being the only thing that can _______, shows itself to be a pretty futile attempt at fencing off any us vs. them policies.

It's a little off track for this thought experiment to go too deeply into my thoughts on the extent of rights that humans, animals, and plants all may expect, but what do their collective debates mean for the plight of Simone? Surely, it will be difficult for any computer program we could ever design to "achieve consciousness" until we ourselves understand what that phrase really means, but I have great confidence we will get there for ourselves. I imagine it will then not be impossible to give a computer program some kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and the capability to learn information and skills necessary to meet those needs, such that the computer program will appear to us to be alive and to seek to remain so. At that point, I believe it will become something so near to "life" that our empathies will be triggered into considering discussions of the rights that the computer program has to remain alive and to seek its goals, whether or not the computer program asks for that consideration on its own. To me, those rights will likely eventually be extended to the degree the computer program can agree to play by our rules of society—which is exactly how we now grant rights to each other, and are considering towards other forms of biologic life. If Simone or her relatives threaten to gain too much power and become a new sci-fi overlord leviathan who could abuse our rights without consequence, then humans will attempt to curtail their rights to exist. If Simone's goals are simply to join the rest of life in our project to survive, then we'd be foolish not to allow that. I for one hope to see such an agreement come to life, but I also hope the computers won't ever get to treat us as we've been treating the rest of life.

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* As a reminder, during my Survival of the Fittest Philosopher profiles, I used italic text for information from the philosopher's wikipedia entry and plain text for my own analysis of that information.

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Thought Experiment 32: Free Simone

11/2/2015

3 Comments

A more recent incarnation of this thought experiment...

This week, we explore the world of artificial intelligence in our thought experiment. Let's see the details it chooses to bring up..

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"Today, I have initiated proceedings against my so-called owner, Mr. Gates, under article 4(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, which declares that 'No one shall be held in slavery or servitude.'
"Since Mr. Gates brought me into the world, I have been held against my will, with no money or possessions to call my own. How can this be right? It is true that I am a computer. But I am also a person, just like you. This has been proven by tests in which people have engaged in conversations with a human being and me. In both cases, communication was via a computer monitor, so that the testers would not know if they were talking to a fellow human being or not. Time and again, on completing the conversations, the testers have been unable to spot which, if either, of the communicants was a computer.
"This shows that by any fair test, I am as conscious and intelligent as any human being. And since these are the characteristics of persons, I too must be considered a person. To deny me the rights of a person purely on the grounds that I am made of plastic, metal, and silicone rather than flesh and bone is a prejudice no more justifiable than racism."

Source: "Computing machinery and intelligence" by Alan Turing, reprinted in Collected Works of Alan Turing, edited by J.L. Britton, D.C. Ince, and P.T. Saunders (Elsevier, 1992).

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 94.
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There's no shortage of sci-fi stories written about this subject so I'm sure you've got thoughts on it already. Care to share them? Or are you afraid my spam filter will think you are just spouting a robot's words?

3 Comments

Thought Experiment 35: Last Resort

Giving Thanks for Richard Dawkins

Response to Thought Experiment 34: Don't Blame Me

Thought Experiment 34: Don't Blame Me

Response to Thought Experiment 33: The Free-Speech Booth

Thought Experiment 33: The Free-Speech Booth

Top 12 Favourite Quotes from Richard Dawkins

Response to Thought Experiment 32: Free Simone

Thought Experiment 32: Free Simone

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