Tuesday 31 May 2016

Things which don't exist don't add up.

In Nothing is Greater than the Sum of it's parts, I argue that emergent systems do not exist. That every system is nothing more than a collection of it's individual parts and that with full knowledge of those parts, the behavior of the system should be fully predictable.

This is true, but there is a collar to this: Only things which exist add up. Physical phenomenon and empirical effects add up to create a system. Thoughts, feelings and emotions do not. This is because the latter category are things which do not exist in reality but in our minds. 

Because of this, the intentions or interests of people who make up a system do not necessarily match those of the system itself. Is pretending that systems can have intentions false? Yes, only people can have intent. Is it bad? No. Not all lies are evil and anthropomorphizing systems can be a useful lie.

Only people have intentions.


The idea of an institution is an abstraction, a lie we tell ourselves in order to build a mental model of the world simple enough for our brains to handle. We cannot model or even conceptualize of the countless people and relations which together form the US state department so instead we replace that chaotic network with a single block. We draw arbitrary lines delineating one department or organization from another when in reality networks overlap and blur together. We anthropomorphize, assigning intentions and aims where in reality no single will exists. 

Institutions are a lie. When used properly, they help us makes sense of the world and that clarity lets us cut through the noise. When used poorly, they obscure more than they reveal or give us the illusion of knowledge where in reality we have none.

Thursday 26 May 2016

Lying to oneself and to others

If you can lie to yourself, you don't have to lie to others.

If you can lie to others, you don't have to lie to yourself.

Saturday 14 May 2016

Against rational belief in free will

In Axiomatic Beliefs, I argue that certain premises are cornerstones of our thought and cannot be jettisoned or questioned. From this I argued that, in certain cases, these beliefs will conflict and that there is no way of meaningfully resolving such conflicts. Hence the best we can do is accept cognitive dissonance and keep on believing. That is why I believe both in free-will/personhood and in a deterministic universe*, despite arguing in Ghosts in the Machine that this is impossible.

Some argue that free will is indeed possible despite a deterministic world. They argue that free-will arises from our consciousness in some manner, or that we can transcend the limits of physicality to make choices un[constrained/explained] by cause and effect. In Nothing is Greater than the Sumnof it's Parts, I argue that this is impossible and akin to a belief in magic.

Let me be clear. At this point I think that people who believe in free-will because that belief is natural or useful to them are justified in doing so. On the other hand Philosophers who construct argument in favor of free-will, ignoring the impossible underlying tension between free-will and belief in an orderly universe universe, are mostly idiots.


















*A probabilistic universe would also require disbelief in free will, but I'll leave this for another time as our own universe seems to be entirely deterministic (rejecting the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in favor of MW) based on current scientific knowledge. If it seems difficult to reconcile a deterministic universe with our everyday belief in probability, remember that probability is in the mind.

A non-additive view of morality.

Doing sums with morality is very dangerous. But, what is the alternative? The answer is to not look at the right side of the equation but rather focus on the left.

In English:
 Looking only at whether the sum consequences of your actions are good, looking only at the end, is dangerous. It is dangerous because it is very easy to loose sight of what evil you do, to ignore it and justify it, to normalize it and, over time, become accustomed to it. You must consider the consequences but you should not loose sight of the costs. If you must pick the lesser of two evils, you should still believe that what your are doing is evil.

In Rationality:
Good an evil are categories of action (or alternately a scale going from -100 to +100 but hey). Certain things are good and certain things are bad. Judging good and evil by the overall consequences can weaken the association between certain acts and their good/evil grouping. This can be bad as certain actions are usually evil and believing that they are not evil, even though that may not be true in one specific case,  is not good as it increases the likelyhood of you comitting them when they are indeed the wrong choice.

In Academic style criticism of the greeks.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction

Decisions change us. Doing Evil corrupts us and it corrupts us all the more completely when we do not regret it. That is why the Tragedians grief filled method of decision making is preferable to Plato’s stark rationalism.

The Difference

What are the ethical views of the Plato? Plato believes in the existence of an absolute good, embodied by the form of justice and hence rejects moral relativism in all it’s forms. Importantly, he also understands there to exist a threefold distinction in the human soul between the reasoning, desiring and emotive parts.  He believes that the world of forms and hence understanding of justice is best accessed through the first faculty of reason, the exercise of which allows us to behave morally and to rekindle the lost memories our soul has of the world of forms. Because of this, a Platonic approach to ethical decision making is to use reason and reason alone to assess the available options, the consequences of those options and how far each action is good based on how far it is in line with the form of justice. In cases where a difficult trade-off must be made, for example torturing one terrorist to potentially save a dozen innocents, the platonic decision maker should consider the options, make the best choice based on the information they have and then proceed without doubt or regret because the choice they made and the way they decided on it was in line with justice and hence objectively good.

The ethical views of the tragedians differ in two important respects from those of Plato. Firstly, the tragedians are not necessarily moral absolutists. They recognize that competing moral demands can exist, say those from different gods or those between family and state, and that in some cases these moral conflicts may well be insoluble. This is in contrast to plato whose form of justice is the only source of morality meaning all conflicts are soluble or, at the very least, have no superior choice making every choice a just one. Secondly and more importantly, in cases where a difficult trade off must be made the tragedians advocate not that the decision maker chooses the best, or least-worst option and is satisfied with their choice but rather see such satisfaction or lack of regret as a form of hubris to be avoided. The punishment of Agamemnon and Antigone is an example of this. For the Tragedians, a person who does evil, even if it is the lesser evil given the options available to them, has committed a wrong and should feel remorse for doing so.

The Corrupting Effects of Decision Making

There is a distinction between evil and badness. What is evil? Evil simply means assigning the wrong weighting to certain actions or goods. In other words seeing obviously heinous acts as acceptable or, alternatively, seeing them to carry less moral weight than they should do is evil. For example, a soldier who is forced to murder on daily basis, loses some or all of their understanding that murder is bad and hence goes on to undervalue the badness of murder when making moral trade-offs in the future has to some extent been corrupted and become more evil. This is different from badness in that a bad action may be in itself undesirable but is always wrong if the alternatives are sufficiently bad. For example, murder is bad but it may nevertheless be the right option in a situation where not-murdering would lead to the deaths a hundred others.

It is an inescapable fact of human nature that we are corruptible. That is why when making a difficult moral choice, we should do as the tragedians advise and feel regret and shame. The reason for this is that shame prevents or slows the the corruption which leads to evil. Doing bad things changes us. It desensitizes us to the horror of what we do. Torture enough and you are no longer shocked by the pain of others. It causes us to begin to construct justifications in order to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror. Beat your wife long enough, and you begin to believe that she deserves to be beaten. The decision making Plato advocates for requires that we should not feel remorse, shame or disgust for performing bad acts provided that they are justified. My contention is simply that when doing bad, feeling disgust or regret slows the normalization and justification which lead to corruption. Not doing so hastens this corruption, leading to future decisions where evil is done not because it is necessary but because the decision maker is corrupted enough to devalue the extent to which bad actions should be avoided.

An obvious response from Plato would be that the corruption I refer to is impossible. After all, a platonist is not guided by his emotion or appetites but rather by the rational part of their soul and hence their valuation of certain acts and understanding of what is moral and immoral is objective, based on knowledge of the world of the forms. The corruption I talk of may occur, but it does so not in the rational part of the soul but in the emotive or desiring part which anyone who follows Platonic ethics would not let control them. Hence this corruption is not a problem for Platonic ethics as it only applies to individuals who have failed to implement some of plato's most important advice.

The reason Plato’s response is unsatisfactory is that the distinction he makes between rational and irrational parts of the soul is not one which exists or can be forced to exist in reality. It is not possible for any human being, no matter how enlightened, to prevent their emotional state from leaking into and affecting their rational thought process. Like it or not the different aspects of our soul are inextricably bound together in a web of causal relationships. What this means is that either my criticism of plato, that his regretless decision making is more likely to lead to corruption, still rings true or, alternately, that Plato’s system is indeed invulnerable to corruption but then is by necessity so difficult to attain that it is totally out of reach of human beings. In both cases the Tragedians ethics seem superior, in the first because they lead to less corruption and hence less evil and in the second because they are actually practicable by human beings.



References

Plato, The Republic


Biography

Lucifer Effect, The  by Philip Zimbardo,
http://www.lucifereffect.com/

Ends don’t justify the Means by Eliezer_Yudkowsky,

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The

Fragility of Goodness, The by Martha Nussbaum


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Friday 6 May 2016

Rationality LifeHacks

Intentionally seek out information which contradicts your beliefs, Intentionally try to contradict your own beliefs. If your social circle agrees on something, play the devils advocate.

Also, don't weak-man.

A quick introduction to metaethics.

In science, we try to come up with the most general & simple rules possible which predict/resemble reality. In ethics, we try to come up with the simplest/fewest ethical rules and premises  possible which, as a system, predict/resemble our moral intuitions.

Example: In science, you could do without a theory of gravity and instead have a separate theory for every single object being pulled in a specific direction which is a function of the objects around it. But, a theory of gravity with a single law is simpler but gives the same predictions and is hence superior. In ethics, you could go through every single possible instance of murder and say that it is good or bad. Alternatively, you can come up with more general rules such as "Killing is bad unless done in self-defense/war/etc....". The general rules, provided the fit our intuitions, are better.

In science, the standard which we measure our theories by is an objective, external reality which is the same for everyone. Hence, a scientific theory or law is equally right or wrong for everyone. In ethics, morals do not exist in reality but only in our minds. More problematically, morals are different for every person. Hence ethical laws or theories cannot be objectively good or bad. A theory or rule can equate perfectly with one person's moral world and not at all with another's. How do we get around this? Simple. We select a certain set of intuitions, a certain ethical world, and judge our theories against that world. Usually, the ethical world we use is fairly close to that of most people in our societies. Hence, when we say a certain theory is good we mean it is probabilistically likely to be a good fit for the internal moral world of most people in our society. 

Another problem with ethics is that, unlike in physics, the subjective wold in which we live can be changed by our theories. A theory in physics does not change the rules of the universe. Gravity exists whether or not we believe in it. (Note: This may change if we develop technology sufficiently advanced to manipulate the laws of reality. Then, our beliefs would begin to shape the world ). On the other hand, a moral theory can change the moral world it seeks to capture. A strong law against torture linking to many other strong intuitions not relating to torture could well convince a person listening to it to abandon what pro-torture intuitions they had. It is as if  in physics making a strong theory could bend reality to fit your theory. How do we get around this? Right now, we don't because most philosophers are idiots stuck in the past. Instead of using the intuitions of other, which are unaffected by the philosophers theories, they use their own moral intuitions which are changed and hence unreliable. How should we get around this? 1: quarantine moral theories. Don't publish ethical works. Sequester philosophers for life. 2: Ask representative samples of the population all moral questions you can think of, record the results, beam them into the philosophers prison. Now the philosophers have a moral wold to judge their theories against which is not change by their theories. Problem: [inhuman/[prevents any [social good/moral progress] coming about from philosophers work.]]



That was meta-ethics. Enjoy.


note 1: 
  • I make a distinction between laws and premises. premises I take to mean intuitions, by which I mean specific, situational moral judgement. i.e: person X does Y for reason Z in a certain situation. How good-bad is this on a 1 - 10 scale? Laws are rules stretching across many situations.
  • I say the purpose of ethics is to find good laws. Goodness = simplicity * accuracy. Accuracy = extent to which the law aligns with the data, which for ethics is moral intuitions.
  • Problem: People's internal moral worlds may not be composed of intuitions. Rather, they could be composed, at least partially, of laws which in turn give rise to intuitions. I don't know why this is a problem but something smells very wrong here.

Note 2: Other issues exist which I have glossed over.
  • Moral intuitions are unstable.
  • Moral intuitions are difficult to access.
  • etc...

Casuality and Determinism.

Determinism is the idea that the future is fixed. I believe that the universe is deterministic. I believe that, given perfect information, you would be able to predict all events through the lifetime of our universe. Why?

  1. Interactions between fundamental particles (atoms) are deterministic.
  2. All matter is composed of fundamental particles
  3. Objects whose constituent parts are deterministic are also deterministic.

1+2+3 = All objects/matter/stuff in the universe behaves in a deterministic fashion.


Disagree? Then you must be able to challenge one of the three premises, assuming no structural flaws in my argument.





Note 1: Probability as we commonly use it is a product of ignorance. It is a feature of our mental models of the world rather than of the world itself. Probability is in the mind.

Note 2: Does quantum mechanics break premise 1? I'm not sure but if your knowledge of physics is at the point where you actually believe that observation collapses the wave-function, that entanglement with an intelligent mind in one very specific manner is somehow magically different from all other entanglements with non-sentient matter or indirect entanglements with us, you probably also lack the knowledge needed to make arguments based in/on QM.