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Response to Thought Experiment 76: Net Head

12/23/2016

0 Comments

 
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Look, I got a memory upgrade!
This poem will come in handy for the thought experiment I'm about to cover. It's also haunting and pretty.

La Belle Dame sans Merci
   
—by John Keats, 1819

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For sidelong would she bend, and sing
A faery’s song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna-dew,
And sure in language strange she said--
‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her Elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,
And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!--
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

---------------------------------------------------
     No more would Usha feel ill at ease in the company of her name-dropping, bookish colleagues. Confidently, she sidled up to the ostentatiously learned Timothy to test out her new powers.
     "Usha, daaarling," he said. "How like la belle dame you look tonight!"
     "'Full beautiful, a fairy's child'?" replied Usha. "I'm flattered. But, 'Her hair was long, her foot was light. And her eyes were wild.' I can't speak for my eyes, but my shoes are size eights and my hair is most definitely short."
     Timothy was clearly taken aback. "I didn't know you were such a fan of Keats," he said.
     "To paraphrase Kant," replied Usha, "perhaps you have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear." And with that, she left him standing, aghast.
     Her new implant was working a treat: a high-speed wireless chip that was connected to the world-wide web and a built-in encyclopaedia. It responded to the effort to remember by delving into these information sources and picking out what was being looked for. Usha could not even tell what she was actually remembering and what the chip had retreived. Nor did she care, for now she was the most erudite person in the room, and that was what counted.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 226.
---------------------------------------------------

Although this idea has infested sci-fi stories for some time now, there's no evidence to suggest that such a mind implant would be possible. Knowledge (from the point of view of an empiricist, which evolutionary philosophers ascribe to) is something that can only be gained through sense experience. Empiricists "emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, and argue that the only knowledge humans can have is a posteriori (i.e. based on experience)."

So how could anyone "know" someting they have not experienced?

As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. Our physical drives for food, water, air, reproduction, esteem, etc., lead us towards the long-term survival of ourselves, our genes, our families, our tribes, our ecosystems, or of life in general. If you've ever tried to do any meditation, you know that our thoughts about the world bubble in and out of our consciousness all the time, perhaps as vague notions of threats or opportunities arise from the depths of our unconscious passions, which are then put together by the brain into reasons for action.

If we never experienced the sensation of learning the material in a networked database, how could our brains ever know where to pull information from? Could we repeat wisdom from Chinese scholars in their native tongue which we wouldn't even understand? Could our mouths make the clicks of the Xhosa langugage without ever having practiced them before? Surely these are physical acts, so the answer is somewhat the same as asking if we could effortlessly knit or dunk just becase our minds had learned how. Without teaching the entire musculoskeletal system how to act as well, such a mind implant would not work. (Pesky mind-body problem...)

However, philosophical thought experiments are not about what is possible or probable. So, for the sake of argument, lets just say that such an implant did work for Usha. Isn't this just a faster, effortless example anyway of what we can mostly do now with slow and deliberate effort? We can already gain access to any fact we like as long as it exists in a public computer database somewhere. Our conversations IRL may not sparkle with the erudition of Usha's colleagues, but our blogging and social media comments could. (Hopefully some do....)

But facts alone don't make an argument, do they? We need a story, a worldview, a philosophy on which to hang those facts so that they string together into logical causes and effects that make sense of the world and allow us to explain the past and predict the future in order to survive. In our safe and modern world, buttressed by the support of 8 billion humans in societies that have been built over millenia, even the simplest worldviews that rely on magic can now go on existing for an individual's entire life. One can quite easily find a job (in, say, a presidential administration) where you can earn plenty of money to buy food and shelter even if you believe the Earth is 5,500 years old or that the rapture is just around the corner. All of the talk lately about fake political news is indeed very troubling, but such falsities will continue to arise just as long as they continue to fit into someone's worldview. In this week's Scientific American newsletter, Michael Shermer describes this phenomenon in an (incorrectly-titled) essay called "How to Convince Somone When Facts Fail." Shermer says that:

"Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Anti-vaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud. The 9/11 truthers focus on minutiae like the melting point of steel in the World Trade Center buildings that caused their collapse because they think the government lies and conducts “false flag” operations to create a New World Order. Climate deniers study tree rings, ice cores and the ppm of greenhouse gases because they are passionate about freedom, especially that of markets and industries to operate unencumbered by restrictive government regulations. Obama birthers desperately dissected the president's long-form birth certificate in search of fraud because they believe that the nation's first African-American president is a socialist bent on destroying the country. In these examples, proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. This power of belief over evidence is the result of two factors: cognitive dissonance and the backfire effect. ... In a series of experiments by Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan and University of Exeter professor Jason Reifler, the researchers identify the backfire effect “in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.” Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.” For example, subjects were given fake newspaper articles that confirmed widespread misconceptions, such as that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When subjects were then given a corrective article that WMD were never found, liberals who opposed the war accepted the new article and rejected the old, whereas conservatives who supported the war did the opposite ... and more: they reported being even more convinced there were WMD after the correction, arguing that this only proved that Saddam Hussein hid or destroyed them. In fact, Nyhan and Reifler note, among many conservatives “the belief that Iraq possessed WMD immediately before the U.S. invasion persisted long after the Bush administration itself concluded otherwise.” ... If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience,
  1. Keep emotions out of the exchange.
  2. Discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum).
  3. Listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately.
  4. Show respect.
  5. Acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion.
  6. Try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews."

These are interesting observations that result in a nice set of rules to help make sure that interactions are more civilised. But if that won't lead to a change in worldviews, then we see that it won't ultimately help. In fact, it may even backfire!! In my Response to Thought Experiment 67: The Poppadom Paradox, I wrote about ​Edgar Schein's description of "culture", which can be captured by this:

What is culture ? A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration. There are three levels of culture: artifacts (visible), espoused beliefs and values (may appear through surveys), and basic underlying assumptions (unconscious taken for granted beliefs and values: these are not visible). The last being the more important since human minds need cognitive stability and any challenge of a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness.

So Shermer's rules of engagement may help us get past the anxiety and defensivness when underlying assumptions about worldviews are challenged, but still, how do worldviews change??

From what I have read and experienced, it basically takes a dramatic shock to one's life to loosen a crystalised worldview. The Great Depression flipped many of the American electorate to vote for FDR four times. The Horrors of World War II pushed Britain to adopt vast social programs like health care for all. The attack on 9/11 made Dennis Miller flip from being a liberal elite late-night talk show comic into a regular guest on Fox News. In contrast, Americans were asked to shop during the war in Iraq, and the consequences of the 2009 recession were softened by massive government bailouts so no great personal changes ensued. I don't know how to define it precisely, but there seems to be a need for a "come to Jesus moment" (or as I'd prefer it, a "come to science moment") where people hit rock bottom before they are forced to change their worldviews. Even then, it can take years to find and mold a new worldview into shape. For me, a deep crisis of faith occurred in my early twenties when the God of my youth wasn't there for me during a difficult time. (Shocker!) But even then I didn't switch worldviews overnight—that merely opened the door for me to start exploring other possibilities. Slowly, over about 7 years, I read lots, noticed new things, made connections in my brain, proved some things to myself, disproved others, until finally my new worldview of "atheist evolutionary philosopher" really began to take hold as the dominant new framework for my thinking. From reading plenty of other "conversion stories" like mine, this sequence of events seems common.

So how do you know if your worldview is working? In an excellent post over at the blog 3.8 Billion Years, Brock Haussamen listed Five Things I Expect My Core Belief To Do For Me, which I think we can all identify with:
  1. It should help me feel a little less terrified of death.
  2. It should point me towards a meaningful purpose in living.
  3. It should clarify the foundations of right and wrong.
  4. It ought to shed some light on the perpetual mix of joys and sorrows that make up daily life.
  5. And I want it to help get me through my darker hours.

I'd like to think about this some more before saying more about what a worldview should do. But on the other hand, how might you know if your worldview isn't working? Can you know this before a major shock to the system occurs? Perpetual feelings of anger might be one sure sign. In my post titled "What's Causing These Emotions," I hypothesised that such feelings of determination ➞ annoyance ➞ frustration  ➞ anger  ➞ hatred  ➞ and rage all come from the increasingly intense cognitive appraisal that "something is bad and I need to do something about that." That "something bad" is either the world, or your worldview. One of them must change. But the conclusion we often come to is that it's their worldview that must change. They are causing all the bad in this world that I see. But as we've just learned, they are unlikekly to change anytime soon. All of our anger is likely to persist. That's the difficulty we are faced with today on a global scale as millenia-old worldviews clash instantly in cyberspace or wherever multicultural societies are mixed together through transport, trade, immigration, and travel.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms?
I met a world of worldviews;
Each built of only facts and dreams
But none change them.

The information age we are living through is a time of great upheavel, but that also means it's a time of great opportunity. In stable and isolated worlds, views never change. In our current competitive circumstances, however, worldviews will be selected or forced to adapt. I think I've found a worldview that is built on what unites us all: our shared evolutionary history with all of life on this planet. But that's not going to be accepted anytime soon—even if all the facts were in my head and on my side. So while the clash of worldviews goes on all around us, I'll try to keep an open mind, keep building my mental connections, keep searching for a community of support from others who share these views, keep trying to follow Michael Shermer's tips for dealing with others online, and keep being prepared to fight against others who are not so open minded in the real, political, physical world.

I'm off next week for the holidays, so I'll leave you with that message after a difficult 2016. Thanks for your support and I look forward to doing more for a better worldview in 2017. Until then!
0 Comments

Thought Experiment 76: Net Head

12/19/2016

0 Comments

 
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You know, I can quote wikipedia any time I want...
Ooh, goodie. We've got a striaghtforward sci-fi scenario for this week's thought experiment. See what you think of this.

---------------------------------------------------
     No more would Usha feel ill at ease in the company of her name-dropping, bookish colleagues. Confidently, she sidled up to the ostentatiously learned Timothy to test out her new powers.
     "Usha, daaarling," he said. "How like la belle dame you look tonight!"
     "'Full beautiful, a faery's child'?" replied Usha. "I'm flattered. But, 'Her hair was long, her foot was light. And her eyes were wild.' I can't speak for my eyes, but my shoes are size eights and my hair is most definitely short."
     Timothy was clearly taken aback. "I didn't know you were such a fan of Keats," he said.
     "To paraphrase Kant," replied Usha, "perhaps you have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear." And with that, she left him standing, aghast.
     Her new implant was working a treat: a high-speed wireless chip that was connected to the world-wide web and a built-in encyclopaedia. It responded to the effort to remember by delving into these information sources and picking out what was being looked for. Usha could not even tell what she was actually remembering and what the chip had retreived. Nor did she care, for now she was the most erudite person in the room, and that was what counted.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 226.
---------------------------------------------------

So, could instant access to facts ever equal great wisdom? If so, what's the difference between this scenario and real-world abilities to now google practically anything? If that isn't making us wiser...why not? I'll be back on Friday with my answer in my last blog post of the year.
0 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 75: The Ring of Gyges

12/16/2016

3 Comments

 
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Invisibility. At least 30 movies (some of them pornographic) have been made about the subject of this week's thought experiment, but as you can see in the source citation below, it's an idea that's much, much older than movies themselves. Let's dive in and see if there's anything left that's hidden in this subject.

---------------------------------------------------
     Herbert slipped the ring of Gyges on to his finger and was immediately startled by what he saw: nothing. He had become invisible.
     For the first few hours, he wandered around testing his new invisibility. Once, he accidentally coughed and found that in the ears of the world, he was silent too. But he had physical bulk, and would leave an impression on a soft cushion or create an unexplained obstacle for those seeking to walk through him.
     Once he became used to what it was like to live invisibly, Herbert started to think about what he could do next. To his shame, the ideas that popped into his head first were not entirely savoury. He could, for instance, loiter in the women's showers or changing rooms. He could quite easily steal. He could also trip up the obnoxious suits who shouted into their mobile phones.
     But he wanted to resist such base temptations and so tried to think of what good deeds he could do. The opportunities here, however, were less obvious. And for how long could he resist the temptation to take advantage of his invisibility in less edifying ways? All it would take would be one moment of weakness and there he'd be: peeking at naked women or stealing money. Did he have the strength to resist?

Source: Book two of The Republic by Plato, 360 BCE.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 223.
---------------------------------------------------

In the original text, during an exploration into the concept of justice, Plato thought it was absurd that we would have the strength to resist the temptations of the power of invisibility. In Plato's version, a shepherd named Gyges finds a gold ring that makes him invisible, whereupon...:

"...he contrived to be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; where as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king and slew him, and took the kingdom. Suppose now that there were two such magic rings, and the just put on one of them and the unjust the other; no man can be imagined to be of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice. No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with anyone at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice. Enough of this."

Anyone who has read or heard of Raskolnikov's inner turmoil in Crime and Punishment knows that this isn't entirely correct. It is hard to imagine owning Gyges' ring and never using it for unjust purposes, but crimes do fill people with guilt over their past actions, as well as dread about those actions being discovered in the future. Wouldn't the owner of such a ring of invisibility worry about being blamed for any unsolved crimes if the power they possessed ever came to light? Of course they would. To think people would automatically and continually commit crimes just because they could is based on a flawed belief that human's are inherrently selfish and evil. Even though no one (we know of) has been given the gift/curse of invisibility, there are already countless examples of people acting well even though they were certain that no one was or could be watching them. We do so because we have deeply embeded evolutionary reasons to find such actions rewarding.


On this week's Psychology Podcast with Dr. Scott Barry Kauffman, the host discussed scientific findings with his guest—Dr. Dacher Keltner, the author of Born to Be Good and The Power Paradox--which delved into these evolutionary reasons. I particuarlly enjoyed this part of the interview from about 21:30 to 28:00:

SBK: You brought up guilt, and there seems to be a link between guilt and prosociality. Is that right?
DK: Yeah, there is.
SBK: Why? Why is there a link there?
DK: When you have done things to make you feel guilt, typically you've harmed someone else, or maybe there's harm in the world that you've created and your reputation is jeopardized. And so given that, guiit, studies show, tends to make you more prosocial, more altruistic. Studies find that if I tend to be a little bit prone to guilt, I'm a better leader, because I'm kind of worried about hurting other people's feelings and as a result I do things that are better for leadership so it's a really undervalued emotion in our culture.
SBK: Well, you know, that's really interesting because you study power as well right?.
DK: Yeah, and that's my more recent book, The Power Paradox, where you get power by advancing the welfare of others, sharing resources, expressing gratitude. But then with power, once we feel above people, we feel priveleged, or we feel invincible...we act like jerks. And that's why — I think this was in the footnotes to The Power Paradox — guilt is a really important emotion to be looking for in leaders. Are they going to correct themselves if they make mistakes? Are they going to figure out ways to make amends for any damages they've caused? So it's a counterintuitively important emotion for effective power.
SBK: Super interesting. Although there are certainly cases where a lot of people who were jerks in power were jerks when they were born. Right?
DK: Yeah, but I think those are less typical than you might imagine. I think the more common trajectory is that we start out being more interested in other people, and power kind of brings out the bad in human nature. Even when you study Joseph Stalin, it really was power that turned him into a madman. A lot of historians, when they look at Hitler's early life, he was just kind of an awkward weird person with artistic sensitivities and sensibilities, but power turned him into one of the world's worst madmen. So I think that's more common.
SBK: Okay. I want to believe that. Apparently, you do a Trump impersonation. Is that right?
DK: (Laughs) Yes. But actually, this leads to a scientific finding that's important so... In my new book I write about how everybody thinks that people rise in power by being Machiavellian and narcissistic, but the data don't line up with that thinking. Instead, what the data show is that once I have power, I become narcissistic and Machiavelian. My colleague and I just published a paper in Psychological Science to really test this for the first time in a very direct way. We looked at U.S. senators and we coded their non-verbal behaviour for narcissistic tendencies or courageous humane tendencies, i.e. if you show caring for other people. We found that the corageous senators, defined by their non-verbal behaviour, got more support for the bills they were trying to get passed. The narcissistic Machiavelian senators got less support, so that strategy cost them. And here comes the Trump impersonation. One of the key non-verbal expressions of narcissism looks like this...(does a great Trump impersonation)
SBK: (Laughs) But my guests can't see that! Wait, do that again and I'll put a screen capture up in my podcast notes. ... Okay good, I got it.
DK: (Laughs) And what is good about what the science shows for those narcisstic Machiavelian politicians in the senate is that...no one likes them! No one wanted to support their bills. They weren't influential. So, thats another reason to be skeptical of the Trump candidacy.
SBK: That's great. So you know I love digging into a Maslow point of view and he talked about "esteem needs," and I would put power in that class of esteem needs. And it's important. As you're saying, this is like a fundamental human need and when we get addicted to satisfying that need, or when we get it too much, then that can actually turn us into a-holes.
DK: Yeah. What the new neuroscience is showing is that a lot of our social needs are on par with sleeping and nearly as powerful as eating. One of these—caring for others—is so striking. Compassion activates old regions of the brain so it's old evolutionarily. And another [social need] is status. William James said there's no deeper craving that we have than to have the appreciation of other people. And there's amazing work by Keely Muscatel showing we hunger for the respect of other people. She shows that if I hear kind words about my reputation from a friend, it activates these safety networks in the brain, which are activated when we feel safe physically. It tells us that social safety and inclusion is on par with physical safety, and that drives us, like you were very aptly saying, to go after attention and respect and power. But then the trouble is that once we feel power we lose sight of the very things that got us the status and respect of others in the first place.
​SBK: I love that.

And I love that too. I often write about the need to find balance between the fundamental decisions to compete or cooperate with others. Navigating the power paradox looks to me like it walks the razor's edge between those two choices too, as part of a broader, universal set of tradeoffs that we must discover how to make. As I wrote in my published paper on morality:

Our intuitive moral feelings are often in conflict because of the debates that rage within us regarding the self vs. society, or society vs. the environment, or the short-term vs. the long-term, or just the fundamental choices between competition and cooperation. This is what drives the two faces of humankind. We are neither inherently good nor inherently evil – we are capable of both, a flexibility we must have in order to have the power to choose between alternate paths that are right some of the time and wrong some of the time. ... It’s only recently that we’ve discovered this (recent in comparison to the field of philosophy anyway), but research in fields such as game theory, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and neuroscience has shown us that humans and other animals have natural dispositions to act for the common good of their kin, social group, species, and ecosystems, and even over evolutionary timeframes. Under certain circumstances, organisms will be social, cooperative, and even altruistic. Using terms such as kin altruism, coordination, reciprocity, and conflict resolution, evolutionary theory has explained why and how some organisms care for their offspring and their wider families, aggregate in herds, work in teams, practice a division of labor, communicate, share food, trade favors, build alliances, punish cheats, exact revenge, settle disputes peacefully, provide altruistic displays of status, and respect property. All of these behaviors clearly lead to prolonged survival for the groups of individuals that exhibit them.


So what does all this have to say about invisiblity? In The Power Paradox, Dr. Keltner indicated that we readily cooperate with others until we feel powerful enough to outcompete them. This is a modern confirmation of Lord Acton's quote that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." While this is true for the Hitlers and Stalins of the world, it was not true, however, for Lincoln, Gandhi, Mandella, or countless others who obtained smaller powers over smaller groups of people. The positive feelings we receive from actions that give us social safety (remember how most tyrants die) can lead us to value such honorable actions even when we might be tempted to think we are beyond such needs. Wise people can see this and act accordingly...whether it is invisible to us or not.
3 Comments

Thought Experiment 75: The Ring of Gyges

12/12/2016

0 Comments

 
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Where would you go if this was all you left?
This week's thought experiment isn't so much a dilemma as it is just an instructive thing to wonder about.

---------------------------------------------------
     Herbert slipped the ring of Gyges on to his finger and was immediately startled by what he saw: nothing. He had become invisible.
     For the first few hours, he wandered around testing his new invisibility. Once, he accidentally coughed and found that in the ears of the world, he was silent too. But he had physical bulk, and would leave an impression on a soft cushion or create an unexplained obstacle for those seeking to walk through him.
     Once he became used to what it was like to live invisibly, Herbert started to think about what he could do next. To his shame, the ideas that popped into his head first were not entirely savoury. He could, for instance, loiter in the women's showers or changing rooms. He could quite easily steal. He could also trip up the obnoxious suits who shouted into their mobile phones.
     But he wanted to resist such base temptations and so tried to think of what good deeds he could do. The opportunities here, however, were less obvious. And for how long could he resist the temptation to take advantage of his invisibility in less edifying ways? All it would take would be one moment of weakness and there he'd be: peeking at naked women or stealing money. Did he have the strength to resist?

Source: Book two of The Republic by Plato, 360 BCE.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 223.
---------------------------------------------------

What do you think? It's likely you've already considered this scenario by watching one of the handful of sci-fi movies made about this subject, but in the context of philosophy now, what can this thought experiment really teach us? I'll be back on Friday to offer up a few of the insights that I take from this.
0 Comments

Response to Thought Experiment 74: Water, Water, Everywhere

12/9/2016

0 Comments

 
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It only looks like an explosion at very tiny levels of detail.
I'm going to be honest—out of the 74 thought experiments I've done so far, this is one of my 3 or 4 least favourite. I had high hopes for it since it's an entry into the philosophy of language, which "seeks to understand the relationship between language and reality. ... First and foremost, philosophers of language prioritize their inquiry on the nature of meaning. They seek to explain what it means to "mean" something."

I've formally studied five foreign languages (plus two more if you count mathematical and logical languages) and I've learned a smattering of at least a dozen others during my travels, and I've written hundreds of thousands of words now about philosophy and philosophers, but I haven't spent any time on the philosophy of language. So when I saw the title of the paper that this week's experiment is based on—"The Meaning of 'Meaning'"—and realised it was practically a definition of this subfield, I started really looking forward to doing an overview of the issues contested here and then pouring over the original 63-page paper from Hillary Putnam. Unfortunately, what I found early on in my research stopped me from getting very far. Let's see the thought experiment and then I'll explain.


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     NASA had dubbed it "Twin Earth." The newly discovered planet was not just roughly the same size as ours, it had a similar climate and life had evolved there almost identically. In fact, there were even countries where people spoke dialects of English.
     Twin Earth contained cats, frying pans, burritos, televisions, baseball, beer, and—at least it seemed—water. It certainly had a clear liquid which fell from the sky, filled rivers and oceans, and quenched the thirsts of the indigenous humanoids and the astronauts from Earth.
     When the liquid was analysed, though, it turned out not to be H2O but a very complex substance dubbed H2No. NASA therefore announced that its previous claim that water had been found on Twin Earth was wrong. Some people say that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. In this case, the billed bird waddled and quacked, but it wasn't a duck after all.
     The tabloid newspaper headlines, however, offered a different interpretation: "It's water, Jim, but not as we know it."

Source: "The meaning of 'meaning'" by Hilary Putnam, republished in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality, 1975.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 220.
---------------------------------------------------

The last time I discusssed a thought experiment like this was in My Response to Thought Experiment 47: Rabbit!, when I said:

Doesn't seem like such a big deal, does it? To me, this lack of anything interesting is unsurprising. It's exactly what usually comes from the technical world of analytical philosophy.

As I explain in my list of terms in 
Philosophy 101, analytic philosophy is now how "the overwhelming majority of university philosophy departments identify themselves" in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. This is a result of the unfortunate "linguistic turn," which was "a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language." Among other things, this resulted in "the view that there are no specifically philosophical truths and that the object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts...rejecting sweeping philosophical systems in favor of close attention to detail, common sense, and ordinary language."

Just how closely do analytic philosophers seek to understand langauge? Well, according to the wikipedia entry on the philosophy of language:

Generally speaking, there have been at least seven distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is:
  1. Idea theories of meaning, most commonly associated with the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, claim that meanings are purely mental contents provoked by signs. Although this view of meaning has been beset by a number of problems from the beginning, interest in it has been renewed by some contemporary theorists under the guise of semantic internalism.
  2. Truth-conditional theories hold meaning to be the conditions under which an expression may be true or false. This tradition goes back at least to Frege and is associated with a rich body of modern work, spearheaded by philosophers like Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson.
  3. Theories of language use, for example theories by the later Wittgenstein, helped inaugurate the idea of "meaning as use", and a communitarian view of language. Wittgenstein was interested in the way in which the communities use language, and how far it can be taken. It is also associated with P. F. Strawson, John Searle, Robert Brandom, and others.
  4. Constructivist theories of language are connected to the revolutionary idea claiming that speech is not only passively describing a given reality, but it can change the (social) reality it is describing through speech acts, which for linguistics was as revolutionary a discovery as for physics was the discovery that measurement itself can change the measured reality itself. Speech act theory was developed by J. L. Austin, although other previous thinkers have had similar ideas.
  5. Reference theories of meaning, also known collectively as semantic externalism, view meaning to be equivalent to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs. There are two broad subspecies of externalism: social and environmental. The first is most closely associated with Tyler Burge and the second with Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke and others.
  6. Verificationist theories of meaning are generally associated with the early 20th century movement of logical positivism. The traditional formulation of such a theory is that the meaning of a sentence is its method of verification or falsification. In this form, the thesis was abandoned after the acceptance by most philosophers of the Duhem–Quine thesis of confirmation holism after the publication of Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism. However, Michael Dummett has advocated a modified form of verificationism since the 1970s. In this version, the comprehension (and hence meaning) of a sentence consists in the hearer's ability to recognize the demonstration (mathematical, empirical or other) of the truth of the sentence.
  7. A pragmatist theory of meaning is any theory in which the meaning (or understanding) of a sentence is determined by the consequences of its application. Dummett attributes such a theory of meaning to Charles Sanders Peirce and other early 20th century American pragmatists.

Phew! That's a lot of different attempts to try and pin down logically perfect universal definitions of "meaning." It's too much for me to go through them all in detail. As a summary, wikipedia says:

"Most philosophers have been more or less skeptical about formalizing natural languages, [but] many of them developed formal languages for use in the sciences or formalized 
parts of natural language for investigation. ... On the other side of the divide were the so-called "Ordinary language philosophers" [who] stressed the importance of studying natural language without regard to the truth-conditions of sentences and the references of terms. They did not believe that the social and practical dimensions of linguistic meaning could be captured by any attempts at formalization using the tools of logic. Logic is one thing and language is something entirely different. What is important is not expressions themselves but what people use them to do in communication. ... The question of whether or not there is any grounds for conflict between the formal and informal approaches is far from being decided."

I'll weigh in on this larger undecided debate later, but first, let's look at this week's thought experiment, which is essentially a fight between half of number 5 from the list above (semantic externalism) and the modern efforts of number 1 (semantic internalism). To describe that fight formally:


Semantic externalism comes in two varieties, depending on whether meaning is construed cognitively or linguistically. On a cognitive construal, externalism is the thesis that what concepts (or contents) are available to a thinker is determined by their environment, or their relation to their environment. On a linguistic construal, externalism is the thesis that the meaning of a word is environmentally determined. Likewise, one can construe semantic internalism in two ways, as a denial of either of these two theses.


For a very quick resolution, the wiki entry for the Twin Earth thought experiment, noted this:

In his original article, Putnam had claimed that the reference of the "water" varied even though their psychological states were the same. Tyler Burge subsequently argued in "Other Bodies" (1982) that the mental states are different: [Earthling] has the concept H2O, while Twin [Earthling] has the concept [H2No]. Putnam has since expressed agreement with Burge's interpretation of the thought experiment.

A number of philosophers have argued that "water" refers to anything that is sufficiently water-like. They reject, therefore, the contention that "water" is a rigid designator referring to H2O. John Searle, for example, argues (Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind) that, once we discover that our water is H2O, we have the choice of either redefining it as H2O or continuing to allow the term water to refer to anything with the basic properties of water (transparency, wetness, etc.). Searle suggests that in the Twin Earth example, the second seems more plausible, since if Twin Earth doesn't have water, then all its water-based products will also be different. Twin ice cream, for example, will be constitutionally different, yet we will still be tempted to call it ice cream. Searle, along with others, considers this sufficient argument to "solve" the thought experiment altogether.

In other words, the meaning of our words can evolve as more information comes in. To me, this is why the many and varied efforts of philosophy of language to find a logically perfect and universal definition of meaning are doomed to failure. As Putnam said at the beginning of The Meaning of "Meaning":

"
notice that the topic of "meaning" is the one topic discussed in philosophy in which there is literally nothing but "theory" — literally nothing that can be labeled or even ridiculed as the "common sense view."

There is no "common sense view" because people don't find "meaning" to be a difficult problem. Meaning in general evolves as more information comes in, and misunderstandings about meaning between individuals can dissolve as more information comes in too. I
n my Response to Thought Experiment 23: The Beetle In The Box, I wrote something that gives us some comfort about this ever-so-slight fuzziness in our understanding.

No one can know exactly what it is like to be another person or experience things from another’s perspective (look in someone else’s box), but it is generally assumed that the mental workings of other people’s mind are very similar to our own. From the perspective of an evolutionary philosophy, this is highly self-evident. For other philosophers to claim that our internal thoughts and feelings are ineffable, unknowable, and "private" from others in society, is to deny the billions of years of evolutionary history that we share, during which time the (essentially) same bodily structures were created everywhere in our species as we evolved to survive in the shared environment we exist within in this one universe. As neuroscientists unravel the functions of our brain structures, we don't find infinite varieties of beetles (or non-beetles) crawling around in our heads; we find 99.5% similarities in our molecular sub-structure. We are not so alone in our minds...even if other's thought experiments can sound awfully confusing at first blush.

What do you think? Do you need more explanation of what I mean here? If so, let me know in the comments below. Otherwise, I gotta run.
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Thought Experiment 74: Water, Water, Everywhere

12/5/2016

2 Comments

 
Picture
Last week, evolution was the "universal solvent." But now, can it solve a problem about another universal solvent?
Here's another thought experiment that seems trivial upon first read, but look at it carefully. I'll explain just a bit more afterwards so we can give it its proper consideration during the week ahead.

---------------------------------------------------
     NASA had dubbed it "Twin Earth." The newly discovered planet was not just roughly the same size as ours, it had a similar climate and life had evolved there almost identically. In fact, there were even countries where people spoke dialects of English.
     Twin Earth contained cats, frying pans, burritos, televisions, baseball, beer, and—at least it seemed—water. It certainly had a clear liquid which fell from the sky, filled rivers and oceans, and quenched the thirsts of the indigenous humanoids and the astronauts from Earth.
     When the liquid was analysed, though, it turned out not to be H2O but a very complex substance dubbed H2No. NASA therefore announced that its previous claim that water had been found on Twin Earth was wrong. Some people say that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck. In this case, the billed bird waddled and quacked, but it wasn't a duck after all.
     The tabloid newspaper headlines, however, offered a different interpretation: "It's water, Jim, but not as we know it."

Source: "The meaning of 'meaning'" by Hilary Putnam, republished in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality, 1975.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 220.
---------------------------------------------------

Okay. I like the ending joke from Star Trekkin', but I think we need some further explanation. Here's how Baggini described the problem that's actually being raised:

Is H2No water or not? More to the point, why should we care? Problems like these strike many as examples of philosophers' unhealthy preoccupation with matters of mere semantics. ... Imagine Earth and Twin Earth 1,000 years ago. No one then knew what the chemical composition of water was. Thus, if you consider what would have gone on in the mind of someone thinking "that is a glass of water," it would have been the same in the case of both the earthling and the twin earthling. But...if it is H2No, the twin earthling would be having a true thought, but the earthling would be having a false one, since it isn't what we call water at all. But that means they can't be having the same thought, since the same thought cannot be both true and false. If this line of reasoning is correct...we are left with a surprising upshot. Since what is going on in the head of the earthling and twin earthling is exactly the same, but their thoughts are different, that means thoughts are not entirely in the head! At least part of a thought—that which supplies the meaning of the words—is actually out there in the world. So the question of whether H2No is water is not simply one of mere semantics. How you answer it determines whether meaning and thoughts are, as we usually assume, carried around in our heads, or outside of our heads, in the world. It can literally drive your thinking out of your mind.

Got it? Then what's your solution to this now? I'll be back on Friday with mine.
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