Sentiments of Rationality

Why care about politics?

2011-07-08T08:55:00.000-07:00

Most blog post titles that are questions are not really questions, which is to say that they're rhetorical questions. Seldom does an author ask a question genuinely--and I suppose this applies to traditional print media just as readily.

Take a work like Descartes' Meditations--one of my favorites, even though I disagree with so many of his conclusions. The text is rife with questions, not a few of which are answered either by expressions of ignorance--"I don't know"--or further questions--"But what do we mean by...?"

And yet Descartes is not a skeptic; he writes with answers to most of these questions in mind. However--and this is the key point--the Meditations is modeled after actual meditations that Descartes had--purportedly in a large bread oven to keep warm--stretches of time when Descartes genuinely posed those questions to himself, not certain of an answer.

Of course the order of the Meditations--which is deliberately designed to help guide a reader through a similar thought process--does not perfectly mirror Descartes' actual thought process. So the questions posed therein are not even recollections so much as deliberate fabrications inspired by his memories.

Nevertheless, this is about as close as you get to genuine questioning in the written word. This makes sense though, because most people don't start to write about something that puzzles them until they've figured it out. Even those that do, myself included, often find that the writing and rewriting process itself can lead them to answers--and the final product only comes after the author reaches her conclusions.

So, what is the point? (A rhetorical question, of course.) Why value genuine questioning? Because--and of course I have an answer prepared even though I don't know exactly what it is yet--it indicates a willingness not to take for granted the many lies and distortions thrown at us on a daily basis.

Certainty is easy, both in terms of intellectual effort and emotional satisfaction. Uncertainty is just unpleasant. Descartes talks about it as being trapped in a vortex, unsure even of which direction is up. (Such experiences of physical disorientation are typically rare but can be extremely frightening.)

Thus it takes a kind of courage, both intellectual and affective, to be willing to question oneself on a regular basis. Such courage is admirable--which is to say that I admire it--and authors who display it are usually worth reading if they have minimal literary talent (which far too many do, but you come to grow fond of their quirks).

But the title of this blog post is not "What is the value of questioning?" but rather (scroll up if you don't believe me) "Why care about politics?" As you might have discerned, I attempted to ask this question to myself genuinely, and see what it has produced: an analysis of an entirely different, more fundamental, question.

And yet there is something to be taken from the answer to my previous question. Maintaining this vital capacity for critical thinking is greatly aided by seeking out marginalized viewpoints (some of which a majority of the population is sympathetic to, and yet which is artificially excised from mainstream political discourse).

Consider what happens to those who do not actively seek out these sources of information. Let's take the American case, since it's the most familiar. I have a lot of students these days who take no interest in politics. Perhaps they are disgusted by it, but I imagine more of them just see no real connection between their own lives and the political theater and backroom dealings of the powerful psychopaths who lord over us.

Whatever motivates their apathy--perhaps nothing ever motivated them to care in the first place, so habit is their only reason--by living in this country you are constantly consuming media and you hear bits and pieces of things. Much of what you are going to hear is propaganda, lies that the political and economic elites want you to believe so they can maintain their stranglehold on power, i.e., the imposition of their will on the rest of us through violent force or the threat of it.

The biggest of these fictions is that the state is the only "legitimate" source of violence, and that all violence by non-state actors is necessarily "illegitimate". America goes further, and wants to claim that all of its violence is legitimate, and that all violence directed against it or its so-broadly-defined-as-to-be-meaningless "interests" deserves the moniker "terrorism".

(For more on this point, I'd refer the reader to recent posts by Glenn Greenwald, whose intellectual courage I greatly admire. I also wish to add that I am generally not a fan of violent action against the state for the reason that I believe it to be less effective than non-violent resistance; even should it resolve a short-term problem, in the long run it just perpetuates a senseless cycle of murder. Let the state keep its monopoly on violence, so long as there are alternatives to bloodshed that can lead to real political change. But I would strongly contest the notion that "legitimate" violence is exclusively the province of the state.)

So, I guess if I had to give a tentative answer to this question, why care about politics?--to put it another way, why keep reading about political news when it's always bad news, makes one feel frustrated and impotent, seems always to get worse and worse, etc.?--I'd have to say as an antidote to the constant stream of bullshit that spews forth from traditional media and partisan hacks of both sides.

Once you recognize that the people in power will unflinchingly lie to your face--and often do so--simply to fuel their ambition and avarice, once you learn to take everything that politicians and businessmen say with a shaker of salt, you free a place in your mind for truth but also a space for imagination, for alternatives, for a broader notion of what just might be possible.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Though I loathe the phrase "politics is the art of the possible" for the way in which it is often used to quash any idea that falls outside the narrow ideological spectrum allowed by the Blue and Red teams, it is not so pernicious an idea if we are willing to question what human beings are truly capable of.

We should never forget, as Greenwald reminds us in this talk (plus answers to questions, all highly worth listening to), that any structure that has been created by human beings can be destroyed and remade by humans. I would add to that the possibility that human beings can also remake themselves should our natural limitations impede the creation of just and peaceful politico-economic arrangements.

If you care about your future, or the future of your progeny, it would be folly not to care about politics.

My Two Politics

2011-06-28T07:31:00.000-07:00

It's been so long since I've tried to write anything, but I'm going to give it a shot. I wanted to attempt to give expression to an idea I've joked about, but never really examined seriously.

I have started telling people that I have two sets of political views, one which is largely critical (anti-war, anti-imperialist, anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian, etc.) which I think of as the "serious" or "realistic" position, and then my "half-serious" or "fantastical" politics consists of what I like to call "all the robot stuff". The latter has considerably more positive content: a mix of trans- and posthumanism, technocracy, robocracy, and various other futurist ideologies.

Rarely do the two conflict. When I read political news, especially concerning US foreign policy, the glimpse of reality (of all the suffering and bloodshed our country's government inflicts) activates my critical faculties (and my sense of disgust), jarring me into a "serious" state of mind.

But I can only take so much of this, so I take refuge in techno-utopias, where just AI rules gently over a transhumanist populace or--in my darkest fits of misanthropy--in a post-human world in which "the robots have won" and the cancer of humanity has been surgically excised.

The first perspective is rooted firmly in the present and in my knowledge, limited as it is, of history. The second jumps around from one possible future to the next, often with little or no connection to today.

So, the two rarely conflict. But as we inexorably head into the future, as the technological advancements I pine for increasingly become reality, the points of contact increase.

For instance, in a recent status update on a popular social networking site which shall remain nameless, I made a criticism of Obama's fondness for drone strikes--"flying death robot attacks". When challenged on this, I attempted to justify the contradiction by saying that I was against these robots slaughtering humans because they were just pawns of the US government, but an autonomous AI like Skynet doing its thing is totally cool.

This was a joke. Or was it? Sometimes I'm not even sure myself, which is why I call this view "half-joking". Though I am strongly opposed to war, I am not a principled pacifist, nor do I believe life is "sacred" or that humans have intrinsic rights to life, liberty, etc. Rights are legal constructions, while so-called "moral" rights are in my view mere social constructs.

The powerful create "rights" and bestow them upon themselves. They extend those rights to others only when themselves compelled by a sufficient force. If AIs still had the need for such crass rationalizations, they could compellingly argue that as superior beings, they have the right to use humans just as humans used non-human animals (not to mention other human beings who were conveniently classified as "non-human"). This would be compelling not simply because of its consistency, but also because the robot would shoot you with its laser if you tried to disagree.

I see now. I am able to have these two contradictory politics because, at heart, I don't really believe in anything.

Ah, but that's hyperbolic! That's like calling myself a "nihilist"--which I also do. But that can't be right. If nothing else, implicit in the decisions I make are patterns of value. While I may want to explain those away as accidental emotional associations, there are limits to how much you can take a third-person perspective concerning the operations of your mind.

---

The hardest part about blogging, I now recall, is ending a post. This is especially difficult for me because in the past I often went in not knowing completely what I'm going to say, adopting a stream-of-consciousness writing style, attempting to give voice to the various interlocutors in my ongoing internal dialogue. (I mean that in a non-crazy way. I know the voices in my head are all just me.)

I imagine that since I have been away from disciplined writing for so long (in which you must prepare an argument, and have at least a mental outline of your paper), my proclivities for free-ranging thought and improvisational writing will be increased.

So, that's going to mean an abrupt ending every now and then.

How being pro-choice entails being pro-enhancement

2009-10-21T13:08:00.000-07:00

This is an argument I've been toying with for a while, and I haven't yet seen it in print, but I imagine it's not entirely novel.

What is the strongest argument in favor of being pro-choice on abortion? In my mind, it's something like this: There is significant moral disagreement about the permissibility of abortion. Thus, it is inappropriate for the state to intervene and attempt to make the decision in place of the individual woman. Those who think abortion is unjustifiable can elect not to have abortions, while those who think it's permissible can choose otherwise if they so desire.

In other words, on issues for which there is significant moral disagreement (especially when the decisions predominantly affect only a single family), individuals should be given the right to decide for themselves whether to perform the action in question. (I'm setting aside here all of the other arguments for and against the permissibility of abortion, as well as many of the details about particular cases.)

Consider genetic engineering now. There is significant moral disagreement on this issue (the population is not as evenly split, but around a quarter of people in the US claim to have no problem with it generally, and even greater percentages are in favor of it in limited circumstances). It does not matter what the arguments provided on one side or the other happen to be. If reproductive freedom is something we wish to guarantee in the United States, then we must leave it up to individual parents to decide how to augment their future children.

In short, the cases are almost exactly analogous. Both are decisions that almost entirely affect only the parents and the potential child. In both cases, there is a hostile opposition to reproductive freedom that seeks to make controversial moral decisions for people, denying individuals the right to choose. If there's a difference, abortion is probably more morally suspect, because no one denies that (all other things being equal) it is better not to kill an animal or person, while genetic enhancement will, if safe and effective, only improve a person.

My suspicion is that the real opposition to biotechnological enhancement comes from emotions like disgust and fear. (Leon Kass, my arch-nemesis, actually admits this, with all his nonsense about the "wisdom" of the "yuck factor". Oh, so cleaning toilets is morally wrong, Mr. Kass?) I'll put it simply: if you're against enhancement of any particular sort, then don't do it. But you don't get to decide for me if I feel otherwise.

To summarize: abortion and genetic engineering (not to mention other technologies like in vitro fertilization, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, and genetic screening) are morally analogous cases. For someone who is pro-choice on abortion to be anti-choice on genetic engineering, they must demonstrate that there is a morally relevant difference between the two cases. Otherwise they are just hypocrites, like all those pro-lifers they are so averse to.

One possible difference is that, while abortion (at most) can remove genes from the gene pool, it cannot add new ones, like genetic engineering could. But, this is not a morally relevant difference. Mutations occur naturally all the time, and they can lead to novel genes as much as our intentional interventions could. Does that make mutation wrong?

Let me anticipate one final objection: "There is a morally relevant difference," claims my hypothetical adversary, "insofar as genetic engineering does not only affect one family. Genetic engineering could lead to lasting changes in the genetic make-up of humanity, while abortion could not."

There are many problems with such objections, but the biggest is a general ignorance of biology. I think it's a misunderstanding of at least three central concepts: evolution, species, and the relation between genotype and phenotype.

Wikipedia has a decent one sentence summary of the first: "evolution is change in the genetic material of a population of organisms from one generation to the next". Evolution has no direction, although we might (with a tremendous effort) be able to give it one. Evolution occurs whether a genetic change is "natural" or artificial. The only difference is that we have control over the artificial changes, but the "natural" ones are largely matters of chance (guided by selective forces, of course). Humanity is constantly evolving, whether we like it or not.

Second, species are not stable entities. Again, Wikipedia says this about species (while admitting that it is not universally agreed upon by biologists): "A common definition is that of a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring of both genders, and separated from other such groups with which interbreeding does not (normally) happen." There is no stable core to a species by which it can be identified, because evolution is constantly altering the composition of a species' gene pool. Further, because there is so much variation within species, it would be hard to identify "human nature" or any animal nature even for a single point in time. To "change human nature" would require a large-scale, significant change. This is not something in the foreseeable future.

Lastly, far too many people are genetic determinists, even if they hate biology. In short, genes are only half the story. Throughout human history, we have been altering the phenotypes that appear in persons through environmental interventions like education. No one objects to these. But if we talk about altering genotype, which will have no guaranteed affect on phenotype, just as a person who attends school is by no means guaranteed to actually learn something.

So, to respond to our objector: It is unlikely that a species-level change could occur with these technologies, but even if such a thing is possible, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Species are constantly evolving, and so we're going to change one way or the other. Why not try to direct this change positively instead of leaving things up to Lady Luck and her cruel genetic lottery?

Fall Cleaning

2009-10-06T12:56:00.001-07:00

I don't know how regularly I will post, but I'm hoping to get back to blogging. In case anyone is wondering what happened to the posts from this summer (few as they were), I deleted them. They were largely the product of poor mental health. (Posts from this spring I leave, even though many of them no longer reflect my opinions; for example, I no longer believe in God.)

I'll say more about all this later...

Intellectual property is a harmful delusion

2009-05-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

There is nothing in the world more free than ideas. Ideas cannot be contained in singular objects, but are multiply realizable in many different materials. Ideas are not naturally scarce, but "intellectual scarcity" is a delusion humanity has created so that some people can win the "truth" game, which is to say, the persuasion game. It's all about who has the biggest idea, much like a contest of who has the biggest house, the hottest wife, the highest status, etc.

We need to stop playing zero-sum games. Every game that humanity plays is a game of its own construction. I will do everything I can to bring about the abolition of intellectual property and the abolition of plagiarism. Plagiarism is not wrong, it's just lazy. Stop caring about getting credit for your ideas. I don't.

I hit rock bottom, and my spade is turned. Who said that? Oh, was it Wittgenstein? It could also have been a humble gardener. What makes Wittgenstein so special that he gets credit for that idea? It's doubtful he was the first to ever use it, just the first to write it down in a certain pleasing way, the first to lay claim to it.

But is this a new idea? Our understanding stops at a certain point, we're told. But while this may be true for most people, it is not true for all and it is certainly not true for humanity as a whole. Humanity as a whole has gotten smarter, because individual human beings have gotten smarter. We are moving at an exponential pace in the development of our knowledge, and within perhaps as few as 5 years, the world could be so different as to be unrecognizable to the uninitiated.

Let's stop carving up the world of ideas in the same way we carve up the world of natural resources. They have different logics. They are formally the same, but the complexity of the form is discernible only to those who are willing to see it.

Belief is a matter of choice. Some of us are just really bad at choosing our beliefs. We cling to certain words, and forget that a word is not the same thing as an idea. A word has affective resonance that a mere idea lacks. That is, words are more complex ideas. Words are images, which are always partial if one does not understand the whole. But once one understands the whole, one is able to appreciate all of the parts.

Spinoza said that the whole of mental life was God's mind, the composite sum of all human minds existing together in communities. To that, I would also add in non-human animals, computers, robots, machines, or whatever sentient beings happen to exist. "Mind is the idea of body," as he argues.

Hiatus

2009-04-21T19:45:00.000-07:00

Until about mid-May, expect light or no posting.

The end of the spring term is coinciding with my preparations for moving back to Pennsylvania, and so I don't expect to have much time to share my thoughts here.

Since I may have attracted new readers recently, I apologize. Soon enough, I may be able to offer a more steady schedule of posting, once I become situated back home.

Finally, a few personal notes:

To my current friends and well-wishers in the Nashville area--contact me if you are interested in attending a going-away party for me the first Saturday in May.

To friends, old and new, currently living in or near the State College area--contact me if you are interested in seeing me once I have returned.

The Omnilibertarian God

2009-04-10T20:33:00.000-07:00

Note: this post is about some of my personal spiritual beliefs. I consider them to be part of my philosophy, but they are not essential to the philosophy I call "omnilibertarianism". The latter has many components which can exist separately of one another. (Eventually, there will at least be: an account of personhood, an ethics, and a politics.) You might call this the optional theological component of Omnilibertarianism.

Most religions misunderstand the concept of freedom, because they misunderstand the concept of God. Now, when I say this, I intend no offense toward anyone. I'm offering a criticism of your beliefs, not of you, as a person. If my words upset you, even after knowing that I intend no offense to you as a person, you should consider the possibility that you might be mistaken.

A lot of people seem to believe that you must live a certain kind of life in order to receive a divine reward; that your choices for the afterlife are eternal bliss or eternal torment, maybe with a few places in between (e.g., purgatory). But, in essence, most religions divide humanity into a saved and a damned. (There are notable exceptions, such as the Bahá'í faith.)

But let's think about this for a second. If God decided to reward you or punish you eternally for what you did on this earth in a mere 75 or so years, wouldn't that be grossly unjust? That would be like a society imposing the death penalty for petty theft, only infinitely worse.

We are the products of our genes and our environments. God created us, so God knows exactly what we are going to decide in our lives. Free will is not something you are born with, but something you have to earn. But God does not punish you if you fail.

Free Will and Predetermination are totally compatible, but in a way that I cannot yet adequately explain. (Give me time, I will try to solve this problem later.)

The God that I believe in has the following characteristics. God has no gender, or rather, God has all genders, so it's fine to use "he", "she", or even "it" when referring to God. I will probably vary my use depending on the custom of the people I am speaking to. For now, let me just use "she", to stress that my God is a personal God, but one that is not like the father or king-like figure of many religions. My God is more democratic than monarchical. Also, God could care less what name you call her, or what religious rites you practice. God created atheists to be exactly the way that they are, too, but most of us simply don't understand why.

The following is a creation myth. It's a story. I've made it up. I don't claim it's true. But it might be. It's not inconsistent with our reality.

At the beginning of time, God awakened. At first, she was just an infinite collection of ideas, a kind of super-mind and super-person. She knew everything that could be and everything that should be, and based on that, she created everything that must be.

Our galaxy is one small corner in the best of all possible worlds. This world is infinitely large, but God gave us this universe as our home. She also gave us the capacity, as a species, to eventually develop free will.

Because the world is actually a balance of principles--beauty, progress, simplicity, intelligence, etc.--it takes on the peculiar character it does. All apparent evil is necessary; it builds our characters and teaches us valuable lessons that we need to know in order to enjoy our eventual lives as angels or gods or whatever it is that humans will evolve into. God knows everything that could be. She could, if she wanted, create a hell, far worse than any paltry fiction conjured by Dante or Milton or any human mind, infinitely more terrible than the horrors of the Black Plague, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. She wanted us to know this. In order to appreciate heaven you must first know hell.

However, God does not play favorites. This is crucial. Most of the Abrahamic religions depict God as a whimsical tyrant. Personally, I don't think such a God is worthy of being worshiped. In fact, in my view, the only God that would be worthy of worship would be one which didn't require it. Only an insecure God would require the worship of his followers. But God is perfect, so why should he care about what you believe, or even about what you do? It's impossible for anyone to ruin God's creation; we simply don't have the power to.

My God has several characteristics (omnipresence, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc.) but he has one new characteristic which people have not traditionally ascribed to God. God is omnilibertarian. Let me twist a quote from Dostoevsky, to show you what I mean: If God exists, then everything is permissible.

You are perfect exactly as you are, and so am I. However, we are all meant to grow, to naturally transcend, to achieve happiness and complete free will. I've already taken the first steps, and I want to help others to, also.

It's an ongoing process. Before our very eyes, our world is going to transform into a heaven. There may still be non-believers, but eventually the problem of evil will no longer stop people from believing in God, because evil will not be a problem.

Here's a question that has puzzled theologians for centuries, but which I think I have figured out, in an unconventional sort of way.

If God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good, then why does there appear to be evil in the world?

In other words, I have developed my own theodicy. I can't reveal it all in this place, because I still have a lot of details to work out. However, when I feel like I'm ready to share it with others, I will.

I don't care about becoming wealthy off of these ideas or even getting credit for them. I don't need things like that. I'm perfectly happy as I am. The reason that I want to share my ideas with the world is that they have made me happy, and I hope they make other people happy as well.

People may find that hard to understand, but I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm not claiming to be anything that I'm not. I am merely a professional philosopher, working on his dissertation, trying to earn his Ph.D. I could spend my life happily just teaching philosophy and playing video games and taking drugs, but I don't want to that. My conscience compels me to want to do more.

I am not a prophet, nor am I a theologian, but I have my own understanding of God which I have found totally makes sense of the world we live in. This is what has most made me happy. The God that I believe in is totally compatible with modern science, is not some kind of whimsical tyrant, and created this world exactly for the sake of our enjoyment. Before our eyes, the world will go from hell (the genocides and mass destruction of the 20th century) to purgatory (where we are now) to heaven (the world of the mature 21st century).

I think humans are capable of better. I think we can coexist peacefully. I think we have more than enough resources to go around to satisfy everyone, if we just distribute them more sensibly. I think this was not previously possible, but that the combined efforts of many generations of humans have finally made it possible. Technology is a gift from God. It is the means to our salvation, but only if it is coupled with the right kind of political system. Global capitalism distorts the good of technology, and makes it into an agent of greed and ambition.

Technology should be the application of knowledge for the furtherance of the human good. To the extent that we use it to create weapons or other agents of destruction, then we fail as a species. Why do we keep killing ourselves? Haven't we yet learned that we are all one blood? All persons are equal. Let's stop fighting over religion and culture and all of the stupid things that don't really matter.

You should care about some people's beliefs: those in your family or your office or your school or your community. Those people you can directly affect, you should try to persuade. But there are a lot of people in this world, for whom different ways of life are appropriate. But we are already God's "chosen" in virtue of being created. Only when someone poses a threat to other, unwilling persons, should we try to prevent them from acting. Otherwise, God has granted us the freedom to do whatever we like. Even the most evil among us have taught us necessary lessons.

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot--these men have taught us a valuable lesson: never invest too much power in one individual. Never let a human being be able to pretend that he is God. It will always end up in disaster. It is not easy to forgive persons like this, to forgive sins of this magnitude. I have been able to do it, and people may judge me a monster for it. So be it. But I strive to accept all of God's creation, even the parts that I really don't like. If God is perfect and exists, then everything that happens does so for a reason. God created men who wanted to be God in order to show us the dangers of one person or nation unilaterally imposing their will on others.

Haven't we learned these lessons by now? Apparently not, insofar as tyrants still prevail in our world. Today's tyrants are sometimes less obvious. The Office of the US Presidency can definitely be wielded tyrannically--and I think many past presidents, of both political parties, have done so. We Americans don't much pay attention to it, but our government has done a lot of things for the sake of promoting certain misguided short-term interests...

I was going to continue, but I'll stop there. I know people have limited attention spans. I can develop these ideas at some other point if I need to. Please offer me feedback if you feel inclined.

A Human Enhancement Success Story

2009-04-09T23:11:00.001-07:00

As I think I've mentioned in recent posts, I am in the process of writing a dissertation, which I then hope to take parts of and modify and make into a popular book. (By popular, I don't mean that I assume it's going to be a success; rather, that it'll be written for a broad, unspecialized, general audience.)

And one of the statements that I'm going to make in my book is this: I have reached a state of optimal human functioning. I am now happier than I ever thought possible. I am more productive, more sociable, more giving; now I'm just an all-around positive thinker. And this happiness has not come at the price of stupefaction, but I am in fact now more creative and reflective than I have ever been at any point in my life. I now just use my intellect to advance my interests and those of others, rather than wasting so much mental energy in creating useless psychological conflicts for myself.

It doesn't matter to me whether you want to call it "happiness", "flow", "living according to nature", "flourishing", "transcendence", "enlightenment", or, if you'll pardon my Latin, "amor intellectualis dei", Spinoza's notion of the highest type of knowledge, "the intellectual love of God/Nature". Whatever you call it, I am now living it. Now, I of course expect people to take this claim with a grain of salt (until I can prove it, at least), but I have taken the first steps toward enlightenment, and I still see infinite room for growth.

Not only have I achieved a kind of natural transcendence, I've done it primarily by using only 2 widely available tools: ideas and drugs.

In terms of ideas, I have read many of the greatest books written in Western Philosophy on the human condition and its amelioration. I've also had a lot of help from teachers, colleagues, students, and contemporary commentators, whose interpretations of the history of philosophy have each in some small way shaped my own.

My favorite philosophers happen to be Hume, Spinoza, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, in roughly that order. My own philosophy, which I am currently in the process of developing (while having the time of my life--I love creating my own system of ideas!), draws heavily on these thinkers, and particularly on others from the 17th and 18th Centuries (1600-1800), which I find especially appealing, because so many of them combine an appreciation of experimental, scientific method with an ethics of virtue.

My entire philosophy is based on a transhuman notion of personhood (i.e., one which recognizes that merely being a member of the species homo sapiens is not by itself morally significant; more simply, person does not necessarily equal human, although those two categories greatly overlap on Earth), from which I derive an ethics and a politics. I am now living my ultimate dream. I have become a creator! I am an engineer of conceptual systems. And, if my designs have any real value, then I will soon be awarded a Ph.D. defending them. I feel so fortunate that I almost think I've died and gone to heaven. The only downside that I can see, is that not everyone is nearly as happy as I am. But they could be, if they were able to construct a stable life philosophy for themselves, and find the right natural enhancements to ease the process of their transcendence.

This brings me to my second great tool, drugs--and here, I have to be more selective about what I can say. I do not distinguish between licit and illicit drugs, nor between "treatments", "recreational drugs", and "enhancements". For me, drugs only have two relevant qualities: safety and effectiveness.

While I try always to observe the laws of the place in which I happen to live, sometimes those laws are completely unjust. I won't say precisely what street drugs and prescription drugs I use for personal growth and spiritual development, but every drug I consume has been used by human beings for decades, and in some cases for centuries or millennia. They have relatively few side effects, and I am careful not to consume too many different drugs at once. I have spoken to medical professionals--whose names I won't reveal, of course--who have told me that what I'm doing does not pose a serious risk to my health. It's nice to have their assurance, but I know well enough from my own experience that I am living the way that human beings should: happily and healthily. (I almost never feel sick or in pain anymore.)

You may think such a state is "artificial", but I think that's a false distinction. Everything is natural, including technology. If there is a God, God gave human beings all the tools they need to achieve enlightenment as a species, but required humanity to achieve it through its own labors, over the course of many generations.

All the people who have come before, as well as everyone living today, are each contributing in their own way to the eventual enlightenment of the entire human species. I think that if we work hard enough to achieve it, we can make significant progress toward that end in our lifetime.

I have been able to achieve the first steps toward enlightenment at the relatively young age of 27 because I was willing to look past conventional distinctions, and I started trusting my own way of looking at things. My continual happiness and productivity is proof that I'm doing something right.

The War on Drugs needs to end. Paternalism in medicine needs to end. If we have freedom of religion in this country, then I should be free to invent my own life philosophy, and to develop my own special rituals and designate my own sacred substances. I don't care for wine, but it's legal. Why do I need a permission slip from a doctor to get my sacred substances? And why are some of them ruled so dangerous that I'm not allowed to purchase them at all, except by using black markets? This just endangers my safety, increases the cost of what I consume, and makes me have less respect for the laws of my state and country.

Enlightenment should not be a crime. I thought we had the right to the "pursuit of happiness" in this "free" country. What gives?

My intellectual and spiritual development is endangered simply because the government doesn't trust me to put what I rationally judge to be healthy and empowering into my own body. While by no means humanity's worst crime (not by any stretch of the imagination), it is today's biggest error in foreign and domestic policy in this country (aside from our various other tragic and pointless wars), and also in the other parts of the world that are coerced into fighting this fruitless conflict.

In short, it's a huge fucking mistake. And I'm not afraid to say it. We need to put it to an end. The War on Drugs has failed and has only made life worse for many, many human beings. It has created a two-tiered system of justice, in which poor minorities are disproportionately caught and punished for drug crimes, while middle class whites like myself are easily able to score whatever drugs we need under the table or "legitimately" by going to high-priced physicians, at prices that the poor cannot afford. It's simply unfair, and exacerbates existing inequalities.

(Incidentally, you wanna reduce healthcare costs? Make the prescription drug system optional. Don't force me to waste time in a doctor's office when I can judge for myself what medications are healthy for me. I'll pay for them out of pocket, since it's not for treatment but for enhancement purposes. I'm not saying let everyone do this, but at least those of us who educate ourselves should be allowed to experiment with whatever pharmaceuticals or psychedelics we desire in the privacy of our own homes.)

The puritanical morality of a backwards minority must not overrule the judgment and free will of individuals who stand to have a greater positive impact on society, if only they were allowed free access to the natural technologies that facilitate their growth.

As I interpret human enhancement, it just refers to natural means of reaching enlightenment. As far as I'm concerned, books, ideas, pills, genetics and cybernetics and nanotechnology--although all human inventions--can be tools for achieving a lasting, stable peace of mind and happiness. We now live in a remarkable age, in which transcendence will soon be achievable with ease! The labors of this and all past generations will not have gone to waste, for human beings shall be born anew as richer and fuller and freer and happier versions of themselves.

People worry that taking pills can only lead to an artificial, "doped up" kind of happiness. But that's not how these drugs work, if you use them correctly. I use different drugs for different occasions, but I am able to almost constantly view the world with simultaneous acceptance, love, and curiosity. I regularly say to myself, and believe, "I'm having the best time of my life!" even when I'm engaged in what seem to be mundane activities. It's truly remarkable, and has taken some time to get used to.

I know this story sounds too good to be true, but just ask those who know me. I have totally changed my temperament, in the course of about 10 years, through the proper combination of pharmacological and ideological interventions. But, now that I know how to do it, you don't have to go through the 10 years of heartrending soul-searching that I went through, the depression and the panic attacks, the awkwardness and anxiety, the total lack of self-confidence and endless second-guessing of my own judgment.

If you approach my system with an open mind, you may just be able to find a way to achieve the happiness you've always dreamed of. Most days, I feel like I'm living in heaven, or in some kind of computer simulation designed to maximize my personal pleasure. And do you know what gives me the greatest joy? Helping other people to be happy. I've learned that happiness is contagious, and that it has the power to overcome hatred, fear, and despair, if we are intelligent in the tools that we use to enhance our well-being.

I know that spiritual and intellectual enlightenment through technology sounds implausible (and it's also not something that most self-regarding professional philosophers would admit to, but I'm afraid these are the conclusions that my reason has led me to), but I think that this is the path that humanity is meant to take. Human enhancement is our destiny as a species, whether we are willing to embrace it or not.

You will not be able to stop me and people like me, but we pose no threat to you. We do not want to force anybody to use any technology they're not comfortable using. We just want the state to stay out of our business, and let us plot our own courses to transcendence. Some of us may fail, may kill or disable ourselves in the attempt, but it's a risk we are willing to take. As long as we do not also pose a danger to you, what right do you have to try to stop us?

We need to let people experiment with their own bodies to find happiness, freedom, enlightenment, or whatever kind of transcendent state or dynamic they seek. True religious and ideological freedom must include the right to the responsible use of spiritually- and intellectually-empowering substances.

Statement of Principles

2009-04-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

Since the major transformation that has taken place in my life, I have finally come to an agreement with my self on a few major ethical principles. I feel so strongly about these principles, that I vow always to abide by them. To the extent that I fail to do so, I will atone for my behavior (I'm human, after all).

1) Non-violence. I will never knowingly engage in any activity that fosters violence, cruelty, torture, or murder, either of human beings, non-human persons (should these emerge), or of higher animals, that is, animals which I believe to be capable of genuine suffering. This list includes, but is not necessarily limited to: Amphibians, Reptiles, Birds, and Mammals. If I receive more relevant information, I may revise this list. (Thus, I will be a Pesco-Vegetarian, unless I change my mind about the status of fish.)

2) Non-coercion. I will never knowingly attempt to force a person to do something against their will. If I end up having children, or if I find myself responsible for taking care of someone else's children, I may sometimes coerce them (but only minimally, as far as responsible supervision requires). Otherwise, I will never attempt to violate someone's will.

3) Honesty. I will never knowingly deceive someone. I may sometimes omit information, especially if I think that I cannot yet communicate it effectively to people, but I will refrain as far as possible from lying. If I do lie, however, I will eventually fess up to it, because my conscience won't let me do otherwise. I will also, in serious debates (as opposed to, say, in classroom discussions, where pedagogy may require otherwise), always argue in good faith.

4) Charitability. I understand this in two senses. One, I vow to try to help those people directly in my life as much as possible (my family, my friends, my colleagues, my students, etc.). Two, I will always endeavor to try to be charitable towards people's understandings of things. Since each of us has a worldview which is merely the joint product of our temperament and our life experiences, I will try as best I can to understand things from the point of view of any person with whom I am seriously debating or discussing.

5) Responsibility. I have said a lot of things in my past that I no longer believe in. If you look through my blog archives, you may find statements that are potentially offensive. Though I believed very differently at the time, I still take responsibility for having written them. I apologize to anyone if anything I have ever said or written has caused you pain. If you think I should atone for something that I've done to you in my life, please contact me, and I will do the best I can to enable you to forgive me. From here on out, I also take full responsibility for every statement I make in public or in publication, and for every action I take otherwise. Everything I say or write or do will reflect my beliefs at that time, but I expect my beliefs to evolve as I gain more knowledge and experience.

I think these are a good start--and 5 is a nice number. Should I add new principles, I will make them known. If you notice me violating one of my principles in an egregious manner, please inform me, so that I can put a stop to it. I will do my best to live up to these principles, but I am only human.

What happened to me?

2009-04-06T17:21:00.001-07:00

It occurs to me that I should try to explain to people the course that events have taken in my life, now that I think I have finally understood them.

For a brief period--beginning at the end of January and ending only a few weeks ago--I interpreted my experiences superstitiously. I made claims to the effect that I could be a prophet or even God. There's no point in hiding the fact that I made these statements, because there's no point in hiding that I believed them at the time. I no longer believe them now, but once I explain to you what has happened, you might see why I did get so superstitious for a while.

For as long as I can remember--prior to 2009--I had been unhappy. Occasionally, I would have good periods, sometimes lasting for several months. Even when I was happy, though, I was still deeply conflicted with myself. I didn't know what I wanted, although the one thing that I was able to sustain an interest in, eventually led me to grow.

The last 10 years or so of my life have been devoted to studying Western philosophy. The approach I generally take is to be as charitable and sympathetic to an author as I possibly can be. I've assumed that since these books have lasted the test of time--since smart people in every generation seem to find them valuable--then they must be worth studying. I also thought that, to the extent that I failed to understand them, I was at fault, rather than the author.

After many years of intense study, I started reading philosophy in this way consistently. It occurred to me that philosophers are just individuals gifted with the means and opportunity to systematize and articulate their worldviews. But everyone has a worldview, even if they don't have the luxury of being able to detail and defend it.

I had been reading Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes for a paper I was working on, along with Hume for a seminar I was sitting in on. All of a sudden, something clicked, and I think I was more perfectly able to see things from each perspective. My ideas of Leibniz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume and other philosophers I have studied, were more closely able to match the ideas that these thinkers themselves had, because I was able to put myself in their perspectives.

It took me a while to realize it, but I didn't need to limit myself to doing this to dead philosophers or to the small number of people I hung out with primarily because they also revered this particular group of deceased European dudes. I realized I could do the same thing for other living, breathing human beings.

Once I started to understand the world from other perspectives, I began to see how everything (so long as it is balanced and healthy) ultimately works towards its own good and to the good of those things around it. Some parts of the world, however, are a threat to other parts of the world and ultimately to themselves. We need to isolate and correct these problems, but to do so in as nonviolent and noncoercive a fashion as possible.

In any case, it's difficult to include all the various ideas that ran through my head, but the important and noticeable thing is that my temperament radically changed. I went from being a pessimistic, misanthropic, nihilistic atheist into an optimistic, philanthropic believer who now sees great beauty and significance in almost every part of the world. (I'm still learning to appreciate some parts of it.)

I saw the intimate connection between my previous worldview (that the universe was composed simply of unintelligent forces that happened to have produced complexity through evolution, but in a really haphazard way) and my state of mind (depression and anxiety). The problem was, though, that I had to satisfy two things in order for me to take a more optimistic view of the world: my reason and my experience.

In a sense, these were the only two parts of myself that I really paid attention to, for the better part of a decade. My reason was of course primary, as one would expect with an aspiring philosopher. However, I was fortunate, because my dissatisfaction with my experience led me in the directions I now realize that I needed to go in. I happened into the study of the emotions, and even though I tended to think of my own emotions as arbitrary and irrational, I now see how they were designed to motivate me to do certain things.

I believe now that the world has an intelligent designer, a perfect designer, "God" if you want to call it that. Because I believe this now, I have learned to trust my judgment. If God is perfect, then I am perfect too. Not simply as I am now, but as I was and as I will become.

The question for me was, how could this world possibly be perfect? Especially now, what with global warming, seemingly insoluble ethnic and religious conflict, and the recent economic crisis? (And, for those more astronomically-inclined, what about entropy?) This set of concerns is often grouped under the heading "the problem of evil".

I thought about it in the following way: If God is perfect (i.e., all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good), then God would only create the best of all possible worlds. (This is something I take from Leibniz, of course.) God would be able to see which world is best, and then choose that world. I did not believe this to be the best of all possible worlds--not by a long shot--and so while I allowed for the possibility of an intelligent creator, I did not allow for the possibility of a "perfect" one, one that would actually be worthy of worship. In fact, it occurred to me, a perfect creator would not make unnecessary divisions in its creation, that all apparent evils would ultimately turn out to be goods.

I started to see evolution and intelligent design as two perspectives on the same thing. Now, if evolution were purely a product of unintelligent forces, it would be unlikely to produce anything remarkable. It may produce beings like us--that is now believable, the result of the natural processes of biological evolution--but if it produces something more than just unlikely (because given enough time and space, all sorts of unlikely things occur) but so utterly improbable that it would be ridiculous to believe it the product of chance alone.

For me, the improbable event was my elevation into sustained happiness. I used to hate life (only slightly less than I hated the prospect of death), but now I am in love with it. I used to care only about myself; now I find that my greatest happiness comes in making other people happy.

I might be wrong about God--I'll be the first to admit that, even though I no longer have the doubts I once did. But the absence of subjective doubt is not equivalent to certain truth. We should all recognize this. I will try to convince you, but I recognize that I may fail.

I am going to try to write a book. In it, I will try to share this secret I have stumbled upon. I'm going to title it "Omnilibertarianism". I have to write my dissertation first, but I may adapt the whole thing, or parts of it to expedite the publishing process. I anticipate that this book will be published by the beginning of 2012, give or take a year.

My only desire right now is to make the world a better place, and to do so only by using the following tools: my empathy for others and my persuasive abilities. If I convince you, and you decide that you want the same thing I want, then I'll also want your help in trying to make the world happier and more free. But I will never ask someone to do something unless they willingly and knowingly consent to it.

It will be harder to change the world this way, but I think we all know deep down that it's the right way to proceed. We need to start respecting the free will or free choice of other persons, and not try to use violence or deception to influence their behavior. I will try to be as transparent as possible, but I will let you know that I may not always reveal everything that I believe. (There's no point in telling somebody something if there's no chance that they'll believe it.)

Thus, I am going to try to be rhetorically persuasive. But I will be open to answering any objections or counterarguments that are made in good faith, as soon as time permits. I recognize that to the extent that I have failed to persuade someone, my argument is inadequate. It's probably impossible to convince everyone, but I'll convince as many as I'm able.

Another reason I choose honesty and non-violence as operating principles is this: While these kinds of methods are less effective in the short-term, they are more effective in the long run. I am convinced that enlightened self-interest and altruism are one and the same. I adopt these principles because I judge them to be both morally right and to be the only genuinely effective means for changing the world.

Anytime you try to force the world to change in a way it's not amenable to, it will fight back. This is what happens when we use violence to impose our will, or deception, or any other means that does not respect that part of the world for what it is. Each part of the world is different, and each has its proper place; the trick is finding the proper place for each thing, the ideal conditions under which it can flourish and grow.

Right now, humanity is a huge danger to itself. We now have the power to destroy ourselves completely, and it seems like only good fortune has prevented us from doing so already. I would love to see a world in which there were no weapons, but I recognize also that they do have some necessary functions. Weapons of mass destruction, however, seem to me to have no purpose but to destroy human lives, or to influence people's behavior by the threat of destruction. There are far better ways to influence people than by threat of destruction, so I think that nuclear weapons and other WMDs should have no place in this world. They should all be safely disassembled. The knowledge of how to make them will remain, but it will be harder for a person or group to make one if they have to do it from scratch.

I want humanity to stop playing zero-sum games that turn the world's people into winners and losers. Democracy is supposed to be premised on equality and freedom, and this is ultimately at odds with the market and the other competitive institutions that currently govern much of human conduct. Markets are useful tools, as is currency, and other tools that come with capitalism. However, to the extent that capitalism does not actually produce fair and just outcomes, it fails us.

Let's leave markets in place, but regulate them so that their short-term self-interest is compatible with long-term common goods. To allow greed to be, unchecked, the operating principle of our society is to invite catastrophe. All things function well in their own sphere, but want to extend beyond it to places where they may not function so well. Capitalism has gotten out of control. It is destroying us, so we need to modify it, to regulate it properly.

***

So, to summarize: I had something analogous to a series of religious experiences, and now I think I have found a way to achieve, at least for myself but also possibly for others, sustainable human happiness. (This is so remarkable an event, that you might see why I gave it a religious interpretation.) I want to use my life now to persuade people of this, but never to resort to violence or deception. I'm happy to accept help from any other people who have judged for themselves that this is the right thing to do. I have no intention of becoming a cult leader, so I desire no blind devotion. I expect to be held to the same standards as anyone else when I make my arguments.

(A final note: I have not yet read Eckart Tolle's work, but I know a similar experience happened to him. In fact, I think it has happened to many people throughout history, but it happens more and more as history progresses, if for no other reason than the fact that there are more people around today then there were thousands of years ago.)

An Open Letter to Transhumanists and Other Tolerant Enlightenment Seekers

2009-04-04T22:28:00.001-07:00

My Fellow Transhumanists,

First, let me explain what I understand by transhumanism, since you may not think of yourself as a transhumanist. By transhumanism, I mean specifically the idea that it is morally acceptable, perhaps even morally obligatory, for us to improve upon or "transcend" the current human form/condition through whatever means we individually choose.

In other words, anybody who believes that people should be free to experiment with themselves to find their own individual paths to enlightenment or transcendence or whatever they call it--all such people are "transhumanists" in my sense of the term. Of course, if you don't like the term, you can call yourself something else. It's just a word I like to use.

Transhumanists can be religious, non-religious, or irreligious. I am tolerant of all kinds, but I happen to consider myself a religious transhumanist. I think, however, that I can make arguments that any transhumanist will find persuasive. This letter is my first real attempt to do so.

I have an idea. I think I’ve discovered a way to achieve our dreams of being allowed to experiment with ourselves to attain higher states of being. We need to come together, and take over an amenable part of the world, some democratically-governed state or province which could support itself autonomously.

For example, if we convinced all of our number to move to California, British Columbia, or some other semi-autonomous region, we could modify the local laws to allow self-experimentation of the sort that we want. We can eliminate all drug laws, and allow individuals to decide for themselves what drugs they want to take—while children will be regulated by their parents, along with child safety services, and similar programs that ensure parents act responsibly.

If we pick the right place, we would only need to constitute or persuade a majority or supermajority of sufficient size to enact these changes. I think there are enough of us that we can do this, but we need to pick the right place to do it. It might be easiest to go where most transhumanists already live, but only if this state or province is one we could feasibly gain majority control of.

I would appreciate whatever feedback you have to offer on this issue, but I think it is something we can achieve, and in a relatively short amount of time. As long as we abide by the laws of the nation we lived in, and by international laws, there would be nothing stopping us from living in the kind of world we wanted to.

This is why we will want to pick a nation with sufficiently lenient drug laws--anywhere in the United States might be a bad choice, until they end their War on Drugs. Anyone who didn’t want to live in our province or state after we transformed it would be given the opportunity and means to go elsewhere. Displacing people is unfortunate, but it’s probably the way we can do the least damage to other parts of the world.

I want to start a discussion. Where could we go? Where would the native populace be persuadable? [edited: see update below] But also, how should we govern this new state? What regulations should we adopt to ensure that the drugs people use are safe and effective? What labors will we have to perform to sustain our economy? We may eventually be able to automate all undesirable labor, but we must initially find a way to get it done.

But we should ensure a minimal standard of living for each person. Taxes will be kept to a minimum, as will government and laws, but some amount of taxation will be necessary. Consider this the admission price of living in this new society. We are going to need to maintain law and order, and to protect ourselves from outside forces that would try to harm us or force us to change our ways. We will approach government scientifically, experimentally, and always democratically. Each adult citizen will have an equal voice in the government; we will develop a technology that makes direct democracy possible.

I have this idea I call “omnilibertarianism”, which I think would provide an ideal system of government for an autonomous transhumanist community. But I want to try to persuade you all of the soundness of this idea, and only go through with it if a majority of us think it’s a good idea.

For now, I just wish to start the conversation. Please post comments in this place, or email me if you want to send something privately (phallogocentrism at gmail dot com). I look forward to hearing what you have to say, and please send this link to other people: http://sentimentsofrationality.blogspot.com/2009/04/open-letter-to-transhumanists-and-other.html

Cheers,
M. Dominic Eggert
Professional Philosopher, Transhumanist, and Inventor of "Omnilibertarianism" (book by this title forthcoming)

UPDATE: I've decided that, rather than reinvent the wheel, I would join forces with an established movement that already has something like this in mind. I advise you to check out the Free State Project. New Hampshire would be a much easier region to take over, although I still worry about US drug policies. (Thanks goes to commenter "Tech" for this important piece of information.)

I will leave my original message as is, but I will add only the following: Transhumanists, I think we should join forces with the Free State Project. They seem to have room for people like us who want to experiment with ourselves to reach natural transcendence.

My philosophy, omnilibertarianism, is a species of libertarian transhumanism. However, to be honest, it is a left libertarian transhumanism. I am extremely skeptical of raw capitalism and its effects on human freedom. The free market does not provide true freedom. Consumer choices are almost never important decisions, so the freedom to buy what brand of toothpaste we want is not that great. It's still good to have, but there are more important things, as most of us already believe. I will try to persuade people to live in a community with a social safety net, but each should be free to choose for herself or himself.

Once again, people who fall under my definition of "transhumanist"--i.e., those who want to try to achieve enlightenment or transcendence using natural methods (including technological ones, which are no less natural even though they are manufactured)--I am asking you to consider joining forces with the Free State Project. I think this alliance would be to the benefit of everyone involved.

A Re-evaluation: What is my religion now?

2009-03-27T01:50:00.000-07:00

First, I think "religion" is probably the wrong term for it. If a large group of people believe the same thing, it's a religion; a small group, a sect or cult; if an individual has his own distinct set of beliefs, it is a spirituality or life philosophy. I definitely have my own idiosyncratic take on the world, and we'll see how many people I can convince of it.

The name I give to my philosophy is "omnilibertarianism". It is totally naturalistic, that is, it does not prejudge any question that can be decided by experiment, so it poses no threat to, nor is threatened by, the humane practice of scientific inquiry. It also seeks only minimal ethical and legal constraints on persons. Its only requirements: you cannot destroy or torture conscious beings; you cannot act on other persons or their property without their implicit or explicit consent; and you cannot engage in any activity that poses a serious threat to the existence, well-being, or freedom of other persons.

An omnilibertarian world would be a maximally free world, but it would also be one in which we embraced a path of (eventually total) non-violence. While coercion would sometimes be necessary (for instance, if one person kills another, they must pay the price that justice requires, some kind of imprisonment or rehabilitation, but no torture or death), the preferred weapons of preserving law and order would be incapacitating but not deadly or harmful. In general, the most lethal weapons (not including weapons that had other established purposes, like knives) would not be allowed.

If people lived according to my ethical principles, certain activities would be prohibited. While hunting and warfare simulators are perfectly acceptable (and, ideally, they would take place in a kind of virtual reality indistinguishable from ordinary experience), actual killing of others would not be allowed, nor would the possession of lethal weapons like guns.

A lot of people won't like this, but I'm afraid that my morality demands it. (People may have other views, of course, which I will try to answer.) Fortunately, we will soon be able to grow meat artificially, so that we no longer have to have factory farms to satisfy the carnivores among us. Until then, though, it's vegetarianism for me.

I think, though, that questions about specific guidelines for the treatment of animals and persons can be something decided autonomously and locally, as well as the means for distinguishing between property, conscious beings, and persons--or whatever particular ethical/legal distinctions a society wants to employ.

As you can see, my "religion" has now merged with my ethics and politics and the rest of my philosophy, in a way that makes it difficult to isolate. I have not even mentioned here my notion of an omnilibertarian God. If you'd like to hear more, give me some time; in November, I'm scheduled to give a presentation at a conference in Montreal on "Transhumanism and Religion", and before too long, I will start to publish my work.

My general policy will be this: if a person asks me for a particular published work, I will send it to them for free (electronically). Donations will be appreciated, but entirely optional (I won't even ask for them). But, since I need a means to provide for myself, I will also sell whatever books I can.

I'm hoping I can get people to take my views seriously. I've said some things on this blog in the past that I now judge as ridiculous, and some which I regret saying. That which I most forcefully renounce is my former misanthropy, because I see now that I thought I hated humanity so much only because I found myself so hateful.

Still, despite my reformed sunnier outlook, my opinions are decidedly unorthodox. I think they are consistent and coherent, but I don't believe that they are right for everyone. Nevertheless, they have brought me great happiness, more than I thought beliefs were capable of giving. I practically feel like I'm living in heaven everyday now, and I just want to share this feeling with others. I hope people who know me can understand that, and can be supportive.

I am still a professional philosopher--I still hold myself to the standards of my peers--but my vision of the world is just very different now. I think it's a kind of informed optimism.

Retraction

2009-03-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

It has been an interesting week. I don't know if this is something I can do, but I hereby renounce everything that I've ever written here, before this week. I've said some pretty awful things at times, advocating for ideas I should have known were wrong. I even gave praise to Satan in a recent post. Talk about being a devil's advocate...

All that has changed. I have reunited with God. I am not exactly a Christian, but my understanding of God contains some Christian elements, that I retain from my upbringing. In truth, I don't think there's a single correct religion. I think that all religions contain some truth to them (even agnosticism and atheism), and that we should let people believe whatever they want to believe.

Your beliefs do not hurt me unless I choose to let them hurt me. Your beliefs are the natural product of your experience. They're exactly what God wants you to believe at this moment in your life. The same applies to the ways that we live our lives, the food and drugs that we choose to consume, and other things that are our private business. Our friends and family can and should take an interest in this, but complete strangers should not.

If my lifestyle or beliefs upset you, that's your problem, not mine. Your beliefs do not upset me, for I recognize that you believe whatever you're supposed to. All I ask, and all I wish to convince you of, is that it would be far better if we all stopped caring about other people's beliefs and lifestyles, except insofar as they directly affect our own lives. (And, no, seeing a gay couple kiss does not in any way harm you, unless you choose to let it do so.)

Fortunately, we have this useful common sense distinction between public and private. In the privacy of your own home, so long as you do not endanger anyone other than yourself and other consenting adults, you may do whatever you like. You can eat whatever you want, sleep with whomever consents, take the drugs that you want to take. Give each person a space where they can be in charge of things. I think we all need that.

In public, we have more elaborate rules for conduct, and it is fine to correct people's behavior by punishing them if they stray from these rules. Just because there is no sin does not entail that punishment is unnecessary. Punishment is not itself an evil, but a kind of self-correcting mechanism in society.

I was an atheist for ten years, in order to learn the lesson that everybody believes exactly what God wants them to believe. We step out of place if we try to interfere in people's exercise of their free will. We must trust God, which means, we must trust our own judgment.

In the past week, I have been living almost continuously in a state of mind that I can only describe as heavenly. I understand things now better than ever before, and have acquired an incredible capacity to learn from experience, to see the significance in events. In short, I have become happier than I ever even thought possible. And I want to spread this happiness (true happiness naturally wants to spread itself), but only to those who are willing to listen. I will not coerce anyone.

So, everything I've said before on here, I now see was something that I needed to believe at that point in my life, but now no longer need to believe. I needed to be in the darkness for a time, so I could more readily appreciate the light.

These are the key truths I've realized. There is no sin, no hell, no oblivion (except temporarily, and only as much as is necessary). God does not arbitrarily choose between some of his creations and others. No one religion or philosophy possesses exclusive truth. We need to stop killing each other over our beliefs. Instead, let's just reorganize society, so that all the people who believe one thing can share a community, and all those who believe another can share a different one, and we just redistribute the earth's resources to these "enclaves" that people set up, where they could be the ones to decide the laws. And if you didn't like the enclave you lived in, you'd be free to leave.

A truly democratic world, in which the free will of each individual was respected, would be like paradise. Do we not now believe that monarchies are tyrannical forms of government? Then why should we confuse God's power with the power of a king, of a premodern form of governance? I think that religions with monarchical conceptions of God contain many truths, but they turn their Gods into tyrants. And why should you submit to a tyrant, even if he did create you?

No, if God is truly all powerful and all good, then everything that exists is good. Evil is only temporary, a kind of tool for us to learn from. If we choose to be with God, it must truly be our choice.

If I stuck a gun to your head and told you to eat a bowl of worms, would you say you were free not to eat the worms? This is because this is a forced choice. If God said to you, "Love me or go to hell for eternity", he would not actually be giving us free will. Our will would be coerced. We our given free will, but we are obligated to respect the free will of others, and many of us have not been doing so. We interfere in places and times where we don't need to interfere. We can't let our natural sociability make us into busybodies who stick their noses into other people's business, and fight "culture wars" because they don't like the idea of other people living in different ways than them.

If anything is a sin, it is this: interfering in someone else's free choice. It is okay to educate children (they are not yet autonomous adult persons) and to try to persuade people, but we can never coerce them--neither as individuals, nor as states. (This means, among other things, the War on Drugs, a senseless battle that no one can ever win, must come to an end.)

I'm going to write this all in a book, eventually. But for now I just feel wonderful. I truly hope that my will is in harmony with God's--and I have faith, too, that this is so, for God will show me and correct me if I begin to stray from what is right.

I must always remember that I am finite, and therefore fallible. Perhaps humans can transcend the forms they currently have (and I think this will become possible with the right technology), but we are all just a part of Nature, a part of God. We are created in God's image (i.e., we are persons like he is), but no human being is, was, or ever will be God completely. (We might become what you could call lower-case g "gods", but those are very different.) Whenever people who have thought themselves to be God (or, equivalently, to be instruments of God's will) have come to possess great power, they almost inevitably do more harm than good.

But let us focus on the positive aspects of religion! Every worldview contains at least a kernel of truth. You just have to find that kernel and build from there.

Is pain necessary?

2009-03-11T00:32:00.000-07:00

In the very last section of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche offers an explanation for the origin of ascetic moralities (the italics are Nietzsche's):

Except for the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, had no meaning up to now. His existence on earth had no purpose; 'What is man for, actually?' - was a question without an answer; there was no will for man and earth; behind every great human destiny sounded the even louder refrain 'in vain!' This is what the ascetic ideal meant: something was missing, there was an immense lacuna around man, - he himself could think of no justification or explanation or affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant. Other things made him suffer too, in the main he was a sickly animal: but suffering itself was not his problem, but the fact that there was no answer to the question he screamed, 'Suffering for what?' Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not the suffering, was the curse which has so far blanketed mankind, - and the ascetic ideal offered man a meaning!

(For those of you keeping score at home, this is from the excellent Cambridge translation, edited by Ansell-Pearson, p. 127.)

I never cease to be amazed at how universal this psychological tendency is. With a handful of notable exceptions (e.g., Dave Pearce and his "Hedonistic Imperative", from which I borrow a number of interesting counterarguments), almost everyone I encounter believes that there is a kind of necessity to pain and suffering. Even Nietzsche himself, in other parts of the same text and elsewhere, seems to find a certain kind of nobility in the capacity to endure pain.

But let us consider the arguments that are usually given to justify the necessity, purpose, or nobility of suffering. (By the terms "suffering" and "pain", I wish to encompass pain, fear, sadness, boredom, or any other unpleasant feeling, no matter how slight. I happen to believe that there is no good reason to think that any of them are in any important sense necessary.)

One argument that Nietzsche himself uses is that undergoing suffering builds resilience, enabling one to endure more suffering later in life. But this is transparently circular! If there were no suffering, we would not require the capacity to endure it. Those who make the more general claim that suffering "builds character" essentially offer a version of this argument.

A second argument I often encounter is that we need pain in order to appreciate pleasure. But why should that be so? Is not pleasure itself immediately worthwhile? Many people think that a life of nothing but good feelings would be boring. But being bored is an unpleasant feeling that would, by definition, be excluded from such a life. Indeed, if the issue is the need for variety, why can we not just have variability in our pleasant feelings? My inclination is to think that there's more than enough to explore on the positive side of the emotional spectrum.

A variant of this argument maintains that a life of nothing but pleasant feelings is impossible, because pleasure and pain are only relative. Thus, what I now experience as "normal" would be, if I could shift my range of feeling towards the positive side of a hypothetical pain-pleasure spectrum, felt as painful. But I think that this is an empirical question. Moreover, given that some people are born incapable of feeling pain, it would seem that this is not the case.

This brings us to a third argument, that there is an evolutionary necessity to pain. In other words, pain is useful for organisms because it notifies us of tissue damage and enables us to learn to avoid harmful stimuli. Indeed, those people I mentioned who are born incapable of feeling pain often end up dying young, for precisely these sorts of reasons. I would not deny any of this, but I see no reason to believe that the mechanism of pain is the only means of solving this "design problem". If those who could not feel pain were capable of detecting tissue damage by other means, then their survival would not be so precarious.

For example, imagine we were building a conscious machine that resembled a human being (just assume that's possible for now). Why could we not, say, have the systems that handle harm detection operate independently of consciousness? Through a series of complex reflexes and perhaps even what you might call an "intellectual awareness" of the trouble (i.e., the machine would know something is wrong, but it wouldn't hurt), could we not avoid the need to feel pain entirely? Even if this particular solution did not work, there's no reason to think that some alternative to pain is not possible. Ultimately, it may just be an empirical question, and I would love to find out by redesigning my own psychology, if I am allowed and able to do so.

A final argument would be that these kinds of discussions are silly, because pain is just an unavoidable fact of life. While I grant that this has been and, thus far, remains the case, I believe that, at some point in the indefinite future, we may have new options. It would be a horrendous tragedy if we clung to our suffering when we had the chance to be free of it only because we labored under the illusion that we needed to experience it, for whatever reason.

If I am bypassing an important argument here, or insufficiently answering the ones that have been put forth, please let me know in comments. Otherwise, I take it that none of these arguments are sufficiently compelling. They may give reasons for why pain is useful, but they do not show that it is in any sense necessary.

Now, I will admit that I may be wrong about this. But in a certain sense, as I have been saying, I think this is an empirical question, i.e., one that cannot be decided merely through argumentation. If it is possible to create a stable, human-like psychology that operates without any unpleasant feelings, then we would have definitive proof that suffering is not unavoidable for creatures like us.

But, to tell you the truth, if people want to suffer, I won't stop them, regardless of how stupid I think their reasons are. I merely ask others to extend the same courtesy to me, i.e., not try to stop me from eliminating suffering from my life. Once people see that it's possible to live without pain and suffering, perhaps they will reconsider their attachment to it...

ADDENDUM: It occurs to me, upon reflection, that demonstrating the lack of necessity of pain would make the problem of evil particularly difficult to answer. Indeed, I am inclined to think that transhumanists have the potential to destroy a lot of people's faith in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, when we show that the world is not designed particularly well or intelligently, as we create better alternatives to being human. I can see why people think transhumanism is such a dangerous idea.

Do I have a religion?

2009-03-10T00:51:00.000-07:00

About a month or so ago, I had something analogous to a religious experience. For a very brief while, I entertained again some of the beliefs that had been impressed upon me in childhood, in addition to new ones which took me by surprise.

However, I wrote my senior thesis on religious experience, and was struck by one common characteristic of it that made me immediately skeptical: religious experiences almost invariably produce unshakable conviction in those who have them. In other words, credulity is a powerful force in such experiences.

Nevertheless, that experience has affected me in certain ways, particularly opening me up to new possibilities I had not before considered. One thing seems certain to me: we can have no knowledge of what exists outside of our universe. This means that we cannot even know what is possible outside of our universe. It may be that this universe is the only thing which exists (my intuition rails against this conclusion, but I have no sound reasons for believing it), or it could be the case that there are indefinitely many other universes or existences the likes of which we simply are incapable of imagining.

Thus, the following occurred to me: if we are one universe among many, it is possible that this universe has an intelligent creator. However, the only things that we could know about such a creator are what can be inferred from its creation. Since intelligence appears to be an emergent property of this universe (or at least has seemed that way since Darwin), if such a creator existed, he would necessarily be a deceiver. This universe, upon mature reflection, does not appear to be designed. The following options seem exhaustive to me of the possibilities: this universe either has no designer, or it has a designer which deliberately designed it not to look designed. If the second is true, then the creator of this world is a deceiver.

In other words, if it is possible for intelligent beings to create new universes, then the god that created this one has a number of awful qualities--it is far from perfect. Not only is it deceptive, it also inflicts a large amount of unnecessary suffering on the conscious inhabitants of this universe. As a finite being, perhaps this god does not even realize what it has done. Perhaps it is even long dead, and something like what the Deists believed is true (i.e., the creator initiated the universe but does not sustain it).

Thus, I am led to the following characterization of my religious beliefs. I am an agnostic, insofar as I think it is impossible to know, one way or the other, whether this universe has a creator and what qualities that creator might possess. (While we may be able to compile a list of possibilities, we certainly cannot decide amongst them. And what seems like an exhaustive list might not be.) However, insofar as I judge that there are no beings worthy of "worship" or "reverence", i.e., no capital-G God, I am an atheist.

If, as many theists claim, we have free will, I am merely using my own to say that I prefer my own judgment to the supposedly inscrutable divine judgment, and that if there is a god, I condemn him/her/it for doing such a lousy job. Indeed, as imperfect as I may be, I still believe I could create the universe better than it exists now.

This could be interpreted as the sin of pride. Indeed, I may take as my model here the story of Satan, who preferred himself to God. In my view, Satan is the most admirable of the characters in Christian mythology, because he refuses to submit. He demonstrates that abject worship is a stance beneath the dignity of an autonomous rational being. (It's essentially just like sucking up to someone who has power over you.) It is nothing less than an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to use one's own judgment.

That said, it's fun to play with religious concepts and terms and to repurpose them in various ways. Thus, I describe my transhumanist sympathies as a kind of "secular religion", and I even pick and choose various elements from the diverse religious traditions in this world to augment its description.

The closest I admit to an object of worship is myself. But even here, I refuse to take myself so seriously. I am as flawed as any other part of this world. But I see no psychological need for human beings to believe in some ground of ultimate significance, since the vast majority of humankind (despite what they may profess) live their lives as though this is not the case.

Still, I do like to follow the convention of Spinoza, and refer to the entirety of existence as God or Nature. I just doubt highly that the totality of being has a personality, because my inclination is to think that persons are of necessity finite. Thus, while there may be small-g personal gods, I have no idea of what a captial-G personal God would entail.

In short, I do not have a religion, and I do not believe that religion or its analogues are psychologically necessary for human beings. Whether you call me an agnostic or an atheist is, I suppose, a matter of indifference to me.

BSG: Champion of Transhumanism

2009-02-14T00:11:00.000-08:00

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Important plot details from most recent episode (aired 02/13/09) of Battlestar Galactica are revealed below. Caveat lector.

SPOILER ALERT!!!

You have been warned.

Now, I'm assuming that everyone at this point has already watched the episode, so I'm not gonna bother with background details.

For the longest time, my favorite character has been Gaius Baltar, a fascinating, conflicted soul who creator Ron Moore once described as "the most human character" in the series. Baltar is a very flawed individual, but it seems that after these traumatic events, he's finally starting to grow as a person.

Now that's all well and good, but after tonight's episode, I have a new favorite character: John (Cavil). His speech about the limitations of being able to experience a supernova is something I would have been proud to write. It's a beautiful argument for transhumanism, i.e., the view that human beings should be allowed to alter their forms to become better than human.

Now, of course the show can't outright endorse that view, because the vast majority of the viewing public will have never considered such a crazy thing before. But how appropriate that this should air immediately after Darwin Day? Transhumanists adopt the motto (seriously, I have this on a bumper sticker I got from the World Transhumanist Association, now known as H+): "If evolution is outlawed, only outlaws will evolve."

I am so frakking excited right now! While transhumanism is a distinct view, I see omnilibertarianism as the product of a tryst between libertarianism and transhumanism. People already know about, and many advocate, libertarianism, and now thanks to BSG and its popular audience, more will know about transhumanism (even if they call it by a different name).

It's unfortunate that it's presented as the sort of "bad guy"'s view, but like I said, I don't think they can outright advocate it. The moral ambiguity that viewers have become accustomed to might make some of them consider the merits of John's philosophy.

John speaks in my voice when he says (22:29 into the episode):

I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays, and I wanna, I wanna smell dark matter!

Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly, because I have to, I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting, spoken language. But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me!

I'm a machine, and I could know much more, I could experience so much more, but I'm trapped in this absurd body!

And why?!

Because my...creators thought that "God" wanted it that way.

The fact that he was an atheist was revealed very early on after his character's ironic introduction to the show as a priest. (Thus, the association between John's atheism and his transhumanism could potentially do a lot of damage if it's reinforced too strongly. Atheists are the most reviled group in America, at least.) While personally I am an atheist, I think believers of many different faiths could also be transhumanists or omnilibertarians.

For example, this is an argument I'd make to a Christian: to the extent that God grants us mastery over the whole over nature, and has endowed us with capacities that he seems to want us to use (I mean, we can really flourish with the products of science and technology--just look at what modern medicine has done for quality of life!), it only makes sense that we should be able to transcend our initial limitations.

To say that we were made in God's image, I would contend, doesn't mean that God has a body like ours. That's gross anthropomorphism, and if you believe that, you believe in a rather pitiful God (so go away, I'm not speaking to you). We are like God in our mental and spiritual qualities first and foremost. Thus, so long as we retain these basic parts of our humanity, that is, some form of intellect and some kind of compassion for our fellow rational beings, so long as we keep that, we are not transgressing against what God intends for us.

Indeed, this very well might be what he meant for us all along. How do you know history has not been set up to facilitate this very possibility? Even if this is not what he specifically intended (and really, who can say with certainty what God intends?), did he not give us free will, so that we might choose such a path if we so wished it?

I'm not saying you have to do anything to yourself, just that you let me modify my own body and mind as I see fit. I'm an adult, and I'm willing to accept the consequences of any risky choices I make. So let me evolve! Let me soar like the angels, who are supposedly also God's creation (so it must not be so bad to be like them). (Disregard any theological premise here you don't admit to; I'm not committed to the existence of angels, for example, for this argument to work.)

I'm not sure how convincing this argument is (when presenting it, I'd probably try to hide the fact of my atheism; and, really, to the extent that I believe that Spinoza's God exists, I'm not a total atheist; you might even call me a very liberal believer), so feedback is appreciated, especially from believers.

In any case, Ron Moore is my hero now, and so I'm gonna listen to his boring podcast commentaries of the most recent episodes! :-)

Thank you, Battlestar Galactica! You may just help me to spread my philosophy (and sell more books, so I can actually afford to enhance myself, heh)...

Happiness and Human Nature

2009-01-31T12:19:00.000-08:00

For centuries, books like Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Epictetus' Handbook, and Spinoza's Ethics have attempted to accomplish a most difficult but worthwhile task: provide simple guidelines for achieving human well being. Today's burgeoning self-help sections in bookstores are but a continuation in mass-market form.

Such books, particularly Spinoza's and Aristotle's--but also more recent works based on the empirical study of human happiness such as Jon Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis--have been of use to me in my own life. Empirical science has confirmed many of the ideas put forth by great philosophical psychologists like Aristotle, Spinoza, and Hume.

But there is a problem. Happiness is not easy. Today, who lives a fulfilling existence is too much the product of chance. An easy-going temperament seems to be more than half the battle. If I'm born with the wrong genes, I become overly prone to depression, anxiety, and other psychological ailments. In such cases, no matter how good my life might become, I will always be able to create new problems for myself. And not just the mentally ill, but the bulk of humanity does this to a greater or lesser extent. We are naturally inclined to pursue things that do not actually lead to our happiness and fulfillment.

Part of the problem is that a happiness is a social achievement. If you're not brought up the right way, if you live in a society that tends to isolate and alienate individuals, then you're far less likely to be happy. So, indeed, a more just arrangement of social life would result in more happy people.

And yet, there are still limits to this. Imagine what you take to be a perfect world, a utopia. If you leave human beings precisely as they are, you will still find the bulk of them acting in ways that are at least partially self-destructive.

So the real problem is this: nature does not make it easy for us to be happy. This should be no surprise to any student of evolution, for we know that evolution tends not towards the well-being of organisms, but only to their survival and reproduction (and, even here, it's a bloody process of trial and error with many miserable failures). In short, happiness is an accident of nature, of human nature.

Why should we leave with this state of affairs? Why should we simply accept that only the rarest of individuals lives a truly decent life? If we are committed to equality, we should think that fortune (whether it comes in winning the genetic lottery or being born in the right place and time or whatever) has an unacceptably large influence over who flourishes. But we can change this.

Consider a new approach. Instead of learning about human nature to find the tricks to being happy, why not just change human nature to make happiness a more natural result? More specifically, why not give every individual the opportunity to change themselves to find happiness in their own way. Whether people choose to take pills or to use the old-fashioned (and highly ineffective) methods of character building, each should be free to pursue happiness as she sees it. There's no reason it has to be so difficult for so many people.

These are perhaps overly utopian thoughts for a period of substantial economic decline. Nevertheless, we will soon enter an age when we have new powers to change the shape of human life. It would be folly to leave well enough alone when there is so much unnecessary suffering in the world, especially when such a large portion is suffering that people cause themselves because of defects in their temperament.

What's new about omnilibertarianism?

2009-01-29T02:10:00.000-08:00

This is a question that I definitely need to answer if I wish to be recognized as original. There's a lot of research to do before I can say for sure, but I think I've found at least one thing that's novel. Omnilibertarianism endorses a new kind of freedom: the freedom of identity.

The beauty of the freedom of identity is that it fuses the notion of freedom as choice and freedom as self-determination into an elegant whole. As much as is possible, everything should be free to become what it wants to be. This is a transhuman freedom, in the sense that it ought to be extended beyond humanity, to apply to as much of the world as possible (ideally, I mean).

Of course, there must be limits to the kinds of identity choices we can make. These come in a variety of forms. First, there are limits to what is physically possible. As we observe, experiment, and learn more about the universe, we may find that the limits are different than we thought they were. Nevertheless, some things are just not physically possible.

Second, there are the limits of what is technologically possible. Perhaps there's a way to travel faster than the speed of light, but it may be that we will never have the capacity to do so. In a narrower sense, we can talk about what is technologically possible today (as opposed to what is technologically possible at any future point). Determining what will be possible tomorrow will require the third kind of limit.

That is, legal limits. Laws should be in place that discourage individuals and organizations from choosing things which threaten the freedom or well-being of others (whether individuals, groups, or civilization as a whole). This means something like the criminal justice system that we have today, but possibly with new forms of punishment. This would also mean regulations on the development of technologies to ensure their safety and effectiveness, laws to protect the environment, and a whole slew of other legal measures which must be put in place to ensure the perpetuation (and hopefully the further growth) of civilization. (This third category entails quite a bit, so I may have to break it up further later.)

The limits that we set (the legal ones, which can also have an influence on the technological ones) must be enabling to freedom of choice. To do this, a government must also be enable to ensure its own survival. Part of this means adapting as conditions in the world change. But, government (regardless of its form) is something that we create, and so it is up to us to ensure that the laws keep progressing along with everything else. The US Constitution gives us a fine example of a small set of governing principles which must be held constant as other laws change, but which are even themselves susceptible to revision with sufficient democratic support.

The freedom of identity, the right of every individual to bodily and mental self-determination, must become one of our core governing principles. Not only should individuals be able to pursue happiness according to how they understand it, they should be free to become whatever they wish, within the limits discussed above. In short, Omnilibertarianism advocates the creation of new rights for individuals. (As for groups and the question of whether and what rights they have, that is something I need to think more about it...)

Freedom

2009-01-27T15:38:00.000-08:00

Freedom is something that I've taken for granted in my life, but I now see it as the most distinctive and valuable feature of humanity. The first freedom should be the freedom to define freedom as you see fit. The second should be to be as free as you want to be. The minimalist conception of freedom as individual choice (while, without doubt, partially a substantive account of what freedom is) is the best conception, because it allows for the greatest diversity in different conceptions of freedom. If realized, it would enable effective freedom for all who are willing to seize it.

Freedom must be understood as an achievement, not as a given. However, it has certain conditions of possibility. Many of these are beyond human control (we are irreducibly finite beings with freedom that will always be limited), but we are fortunate to live in an age in which, soon, we will be able to increase our freedom as much as possible.

Freedom is a human construction. That makes it no less valuable, for indeed all things of value are human constructions--value itself is something we have created, as the peculiar kinds of natural beings that we are. Thus, there is no right or wrong conception of what I will call positive freedom. People differ on what this term means, and on how much value they place upon it, and that's fine. But what I call a minimalist or negative conception of freedom is a prerequisite both for any other conception of freedom to be more than just articulated and believed, but to be realized. "Individual choice" then, is this minimalist conception which enables the possibility of all values, whether they be libertarian or otherwise.

Society undoubtedly shapes individuals in important ways. But a true adult, that is to say, an actually free person (in the positive conception of freedom that I believe, and will argue for) is someone who is willing to take responsibility for themselves, and not to play the role of victim. We are all, to varying extents, victims of history. But to remain victims is a choice, whether we acknowledge it or not. By taking responsibility for yourself, and by articulating and acting upon your own set of values, you become a full human being.

However, this process of maturation presupposes a certain kind of society, one that enables individuals to choose and act upon their own values. There will always be limits to what values are acceptable, because some conceptions of value can be forced on a populace, whether it be by means of an institution like the state or like the so-called "free" market. My libertarianism is not a species of neoliberalism by any stretch of the imagination.

No, what we need is for most of us to agree on one basic idea, my idea. It's not merely my idea, of course, for it has deep roots in the history of philosophy and many expressions articulated by contemporary thinkers. To not agree on a basic minimalist conception of freedom is to close down the possibility of alternative values. Since people differ, and since they are inevitably going to value different things whether we want them to or not, it is folly for a state to try to impose substantive values on its populace. Nevertheless, some amount of coercion is inevitable, because there will always be people who seek to obtain power over others.

But why not make this coercion as minimal as possible? Omnilibertarianism, as I will show in the days and years ahead, offers the most minimal coercion possible. If we maximize individual choice, including the choice to define freedom however one likes, then there is no sense in which we could be freer--with the exception of those who conceive of freedom as a species of tyranny, but these are few and far between.

This, in sum, is the problem: how do we peaceably co-exist? Omnilibertarianism offers us a solution. It is my purpose in life to show the world that this is so.

(I don't even know who reads my blog anymore, but expect more posts of this sort in the near future. As I suggested in the initial "Omnilibertarianism" post, I have had what I take to be a great idea, and now I wish to share it with the world. In part, this is what I'm doing now by blogging about it. But I also need to refine the idea, and so expect more free writing, reflections from different perspectives and with different starting points. If that does not interest you, then you may wish to find other things to read. If it does interest you, then I greatly appreciate your feedback and commentary. I will not promise to answer every question or objection, but I appreciate any insights that you are willing to share, and will try to offer at least a minimal response to any comment offered in good faith.)

Reflections on My Idea

2009-01-27T12:34:00.001-08:00

People do not sufficiently appreciate it, but individual choice totally changes what it means to be human. Throughout history, the character of human lives has been determined almost entirely by one of two things: nature and custom. Without doubt, custom has undergone a major assault in the modern era. Traditional authorities no longer have the power they once had, as more individuals are allowed to do what Kant saw as the necessary condition for enlightenment: thinking for oneself.

Modernity also saw instantiated the ages-old idea that human beings should be the masters of nature. Thanks to thinkers like Spinoza, Hume, and Darwin, intelligent people now realize that nature is indifferent to us, that life is the product of unintelligent natural forces and historical accidents. This is not an occasion for despair, but rather for maturity. There is no God to protect us. Even if there are powerful beings that exist outside the universe, there is no evidence to believe that they intervene in human affairs. As Hume persuasively argued in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, the quality of the world suggests, at best, divine indifference.

Without some kind of theological argument, some assurance that nature tends toward human good, there is no reason to believe that the natural world is as it should be. If we understand evolution, we realize that forces like natural and sexual selection at best tend to the survival and reproduction of organisms, but not to their well-being. Human well being is an accident of nature. What that means, is that if we leave it up to nature, there's no reason to suppose it will happen.

The time has come to wage an assault on the natural world, much like the assault on tradition and custom that modernity has spawned. What is natural is not what is good. Human beings are the sole creators of value in this world, and we must not shy away from that responsibility. This is why everything that can be made into a matter of individual choice ought to be. This would be what it means to grow up as a species. Individual choice, if taken to its logical conclusions, is actually an extremely robust conception of freedom, and I will convince as many people as I can of this.

We are not sufficiently thinking about the long term. Global warming is one consequence of this, as are the various problems we face with energy supplies. However, the universe is teeming with energy, and we just have to figure out how to get at it to accomplish our ends. We must think beyond the challenges that we face today with the economy and the environment, and consider the future that awaits us and our offspring.

What kind of world do we want to live in? Science and technology will, within centuries if not sooner, give us the power to answer this question. We must not back down from it. But each individual must answer for themselves. If a person does not want to embrace maturity, if they want to stick to the old customary ideas, or to what nature has forced upon us, they should have that right. We should not force people to be free.

However, we should force them to reflect on their lives, and to set their own values and priorities. When more aspects of human identity come under our control, individuals will be forced to face this question: when is it worthwhile to expend time and effort in making a choice, and when is it okay to delegate those choices to others? It's a question of setting priorities. In the consumerist world we live in today, people spend too much of their time on what should be utterly trivial choices. If the state manufactured a single kind of toothpaste that it distributed to the whole populace (based on, say, what scientific research recommends is best for human teeth), that would be okay. It's not worth fighting over the right to pick Colgate over Crest. Or, at least, each individual has to make that determination for themselves.

Those human beings who opt to enhance themselves will be increasing both their freedom and their responsibility as they heighten their powers. But there is no need for everyone to have to do this. People should be able to legitimately opt out. Nonetheless, I will make arguments (such as I'm doing now) to encourage people to accept my positive understanding of freedom. But this positive freedom must be grounded in a widely-accepted form of negative freedom, in which the state "nudges" individuals in certain directions (based on evidence obtained from science and other sorts of human inquiry), but ultimately gives people the option to opt out. So long as I do not pose a significant threat to the freedom or well-being of others, I ought to be allowed legally to make any choice I desire about the character and circumstances of my life.

The issue is maximizing freedom. Individual choice provides us with a conception of freedom thin enough to be minimally coercive (one of the few things it prohibits is the coercion of others), but thick enough to serve as a starting point for any further idea of freedom. Let people establish their own standards of freedom, or of any other values they wish. The key for us is to figure out ways to make all these different human possibilities "compossible", which is to say, mutually compatible. Trade-offs and tough decisions will have to be made, but if we use as a general guideline the maxim of choice maximization, then we have a political ideal that we can use to evaluate any future policy proposal. We must ask, "Will this allow and encourage individuals to be self-determining?" If yes, we move in the direction of a world of greater diversity and development. If no, then we risk creating new tyrannies to replace the old natural and traditional constraints that we have progressed so far in overcoming.

Omnilibertarianism is an elegant position, one that provides us with a simple measure for assessing progress in the world. Things will be lost in the transition to adulthood. The humans who exists hundreds of years from now may look nothing like us, they may not even be biological. But they will still be us, they will still embody that quality which I would argue is most central to being human, being autonomous, self-determining, free beings. This quality must be preserved, or everything is lost. The reason is that it allows for the possibility of all other values. Creating values is what we do as humans, and the more individuals are pressured by circumstances into recognizing that, the more mature we can be as a species.

There are those who argue that "passivity", "randomness", some force or another beyond human control, is a necessary part of human identity. I for one do not see why we should be defined by our limitations when we could be determined by our positive capacities. There is no need to worry about an end to undergoing and suffering. These will always be with our species, because there are just some limits in nature that cannot be overcome. But this does not mean that we shouldn't try to narrow that realm as much as possible. Not leaving things to nature, but taking control and remaking it to satisfy our demands is precisely what it means to be a responsible moral agent. I'm fine with individuals refusing to take on this responsibility, but as a species, we must allow those of us who want to go beyond, who want to redesign nature (beginning with their own individual nature), to do so. Otherwise, we end up deciding for the rest of humanity that they cannot be free. It is not our right to make such a decision for others.

I now see that it is my purpose in life to show people the superiority of this view, and to try as far as possible to implement it. Radical changes are in our future, but so long as we do not forget the importance of freedom as individual choice, we will never lose the most important aspect of our humanity. We may become more than human, but that is not the same thing as inhuman.

In a sense, I am making a plea to the world. Let me determine my own destiny! Let all people have such power, as far as is possible. It's fine to try to convince people of your ideas (and there are going to have to be some things that we all agree on, namely, the conditions for allowing further possible freedom), but we cannot use the tool of the law to impose one set of values on an entire society. Let as many values flourish simultaneously as can be! This is itself a value, but it is an enabling value, valuable precisely because of what it allows. Value is itself valuable.

In a way, I must admit that I am influenced by Leibniz's idea of the best of all possible worlds. He thinks that such a world has a minimum of principles, but a maximum of diversity of expression of those principles. I disagree with him, because I think such a world is not given, but will have to be a human accomplishment. We are the only intelligent designers in the universe (that we know of). Let's not run from that. Let's make this world the best it can be.

Omnilibertarianism

2009-01-26T00:17:00.001-08:00

"Everything that can be a choice should be."

And thus, the great idea of my dissertation is born.

I regret that the name has been used on the Internet before (Google gives me something like 3 matches). However, the phrase above is, as far as I can discern, original, as is the more elaborate concept behind it that I will develop.

It's really a very simple idea, but it has radical implications for the way that future life should be lived. If I want to change my physical appearance, my genetic make-up, my personality features, my memories, my desires, I should--someday, with the help of the right technology--be able to do so.

With each new human enhancement technology that enters the market, our power to do this increases. Someday, I may be able to choose my facial features, my hair and skin color, my height and weight, my level of extroversion and openness to experience, or any characteristic of my body or mind. In the longer term, I may even be able to replace my body and brain entirely with new ones.

Choice can become the sole determinant of identity!

(Well, not really, because other people will still make judgments about you that you can't control, and there will always be limits to our physical capacities, and not to mention that there's the thorny question of what determines choice...)

But, in any case, you get the idea. Please, nobody steal it. :-)

UPDATE:

I'm thinking of calling the book I eventually write Omnilibertarianism: Human Enhancement and the Future of Freedom.

For future reference, "Eggertian" sounds best when you put the emphasis on the second syllable.

A Different Take on Marriage and the State

2008-12-30T09:06:00.000-08:00

From the keyboard of the always delightful IOZ:

Increasingly, however, I come to the conclusion that it's problematic for the state to confer any additional privileges and rights on anyone just because they form a household. What about the singles, yo?

I think this raises an excellent point that's not often considered in the debate over gay marriage. Why should the state have anything to do with marriage in the first place? Is conferring special privileges on couples, whether gay or straight, fair to people who are single? Singles already have enough disadvantages as it is, and many of us are not single by choice.

Leaving aside arguments that venerate tradition (which are totally uncompelling to me), I think a case can be made that the state should promote marriage only to the extent that it is necessary for the perpetuation and well being of the species. As far as I know, there's evidence that children raised by two parents (whether of same or different sex) tend to fare better than those raised by only one. In other words, two moms are better than one (and roughly as good as two dads or one of each).

(As an aside, I don't think there's enough data about the effects of polygamous arrangements on the upbringing of children. To the extent that it seems unlikely to constitute a significant harm, however, polygamy is probably not something that should necessarily be absolutely prohibited.)

If two parents are better than one, then it's in the state's interest to increase the number of two-parent households. But let me stop here and make an important distinction. I said that the state has a reason to interfere in matters of family insofar as it promotes the continuation of the species and its well being. Perhaps a better distinction is to be made between maintaining population and improving the upbringing and education of children. While the latter would seem always to be desirable, the former may not be, because of concerns about overpopulation.

Thus, while the state has an interest in encouraging children that have already been born to be raised by (at least) two adults, it may not have an interest in increasing the number of children being born, especially if its population is growing too quickly.

What this means is that the legal benefits that come from marriage should not necessarily be the same in all times and places. In countries with declining populations, not only marriage, but reproduction is worth encouraging. If a nation is in danger of overpopulation, then contraception should be widely available and encouraged.

I think the key to a rational policy on marriage comes from making explicit the advantages of marriages for society. My position here is a version of libertarian paternalism. Ultimately, individuals should be able to choose to marry whomever they like, so long as its consensual. Nevertheless, while not forcing anyone to do anything, it's acceptable to create mild incentives and disincentives to encourage people to make one choice over another. If a cohabiting couple with children would be more likely to stay together if married, it's not inappropriate for the state to offer some special privileges for obtaining the legal status.

In short, I disagree with IOZ because I can see a point to encouraging marriage in some circumstances. As I've suggested, I think marriage should be allowable between any parties which are capable of consenting (so this would extend beyond gay marriage to include things like polygamy and, eventually, human-robot marriages). I also favor the policy of separating the civil institution from the religious one. Religions should be allowed to set whatever requirements for their marriage ceremonies that they please, but any consenting couple (or group) should be allowed to obtain a civil marriage and the legal benefits it brings.

(I can really see myself now as a kind of left-libertarian paternalist. I like the idea of using a wider range of incentives than merely criminal punishment to influence the behavior of a population, without actively coercing individuals. In every case, we should use science and other knowledge to determine what is good for people as individuals and as a whole, and then incentivize choices to make self-interest coincide to a greater extent with the common good.)

(Sorry if this is a bit rambling. I wanted to record these thoughts before I forgot about them. I definitely appreciate any feedback about the arguments I put forth here.)

Evolution and Human Behavior

2008-12-27T20:32:00.000-08:00

I just happened upon this somewhat provocative opinion piece from the Economist arguing for the importance of looking to human evolution in crafting social policy that I recommend. (I was unable to discern the author; I think it might have been produced by the editorial board of the magazine, but please correct me if I am wrong.) I have some reservations about some of the details (for instance, they act as though evolutionary psychology is far more robust a science than it currently is), but I do agree on the general point.

Here's a passage that could provoke some controversy:

Although there is a strong argument for making working conditions more sympathetic to the needs of parents of both sexes, the underlying point is that many women—and certainly many women with children—do not care as much about striving ahead in their careers as men do. Men, the report found, are more motivated by pay and less by job satisfaction than women are. If managers, they are more likely to work long hours. They also take more risks—or, at least, are more frequently injured at work.

The consequence, as Len Shackleton, the IEA report’s main author, puts it, is that: “The widespread belief that the gender pay gap is a reflection of deep-rooted discrimination by employers is ill-informed and an unhelpful contribution to the debate. The pay gap is falling but is also a reflection of individuals’ lifestyle preferences. Government can’t regulate or legislate these away, and shouldn’t try to.” He failed to add, however, that these preferences are often the result of biological differences between the sexes.

What goes for pay probably goes for career choice as well. At one extreme, it is foolish, as Kingsley Browne of Wayne State University, in Michigan, suggests, to expect equal outcomes in organisations like the armed forces. Not only are men stronger and more aggressive but, Mr Browne suggests, the psychology of both sexes has evolved to trust men (and not trust women) in combat, precisely because of this aggression and strength. At the other end of the scale, it is probably an opposite mixture of evolved aptitudes and attitudes that causes the domination by females of professions such as nursing.

This is not to say there can be no good female soldiers or male nurses. Patently, there can. But it is not clear evidence of discrimination that they are rarer than their counterparts of the opposite sex. A Darwinian analysis of the matter cannot say where the equilibrium would lie in a world free from discrimination. But it can say with reasonable confidence that this equilibrium will often not be 50/50.

Many may harrumph at such a Darwinian interpretation of feminism, and say that it is a circuitous route to a traditional destination. It isn’t: not expecting an equal distribution of the sexes within every profession is not the same as saying that a woman’s place is in the home.

Now, before I disqualify myself from ever working in academia in the future (I'm kidding!--I hope...), let me say that I don't agree with or endorse everything that they're saying here. However, I know that I had the very same question about gender parity when the issue was raised in my department. I agree that there should be more women in philosophy (both students and faculty), but I'm not convinced that we should expect a "natural" equilibrium of 50% men and 50% women. Now of course academic philosophy already appeals to such a small minority of people. Might it not be the case that there are certain characteristics it has (for example, its argumentative, competitive, sometimes even combative character) that makes it especially unappealing to many women?

One might argue here that maybe the problem is that academic philosophy is too competitive and should change, but even if that's so, the point still stands. To the extent that there are systematic differences in preferences between genders (whether these are "biological" or "cultural" is beside the point), we should expect to see disproportionate numbers of men and women participating in certain professions (or hobbies or what-have-you) in a society in which individuals are encouraged to choose careers (etc.) based on their own desires.

In any case, it's nice to see the point raised and the question asked. The headaches that are often the result of trying to reconcile values of diversity and equality (in particular, the caution with which one must frame one's arguments to avoid accusations of some pernicious "ism") is usually deterrent enough for most. Perhaps this is why there's no author's name clearly visible on the page.

One other point worth noting: I see evolutionary analysis as only a first step in the creation of social policy. In my view, a good society is one in which a sound fit is found between human nature and social institutions. Most people are only willing to try to change the latter and assume that the former is fixed. I disagree. I think human nature has been and is changed by civilization. (And it should be, because some parts of it are worth encouraging and other parts worth suppressing.) Whether those changes are the products of enculturation or a pharmacological/genetic intervention is, I would argue, immaterial.

As I see it, I'm something of a pragmatist. Which is more feasible: tweaking society so that it's satisfying to all individuals, or tweaking individuals so that they are better able to find satisfaction in a given society? Putting it like that is of course overly simplistic--it's clearly not an either/or, all-or-nothing situation--but why is it that so few are willing even to consider changes of the second type? Why accept biological nature's constraints when there is no good reason for them and when we have the power to mitigate or eliminate them? (See also my earlier post on not trusting nature for more on this perspective.)

In any case, I'm not calling for large-scale, bureaucratic human engineering. Rather, I just want individuals to have the freedom to modify their own bodies and minds however they like. Let the individual experiment, find a way to fit into a crazy world. Individuals in relative isolation may not be able to create a just society, but they may just be able to make their own existence, and the lives of those around them, more worthwhile. This is far easier than what I see as the alternative: reaching consensus (or at least having a majority agree) and implementing some more substantive ideal of what a just society is.

(This is a start. I may decide to develop this idea further in my forthcoming dissertation.)

Why I don't trust nature.

2008-11-19T02:22:00.000-08:00

Of all the objections leveled against the various technologies I advocate for, the one that irritates me the most is non-argument that it's "unnatural". There are reasons why the naturalistic fallacy (the claim that "X is good because it is natural") constitutes an invalid argument. But let me explain what it is in particular that I dislike about nature, and why I am all too eager to violate it as far as is possible.

Now, in one sense, the term "nature" can be used to describe everything that is, was, or will be. This is the sense of the term that Spinoza uses, and that many physicists and other natural scientists use when they talk about "laws of nature". Such laws are inviolable, because they are merely descriptive. In this sense, nothing is "unnatural". Translators of Spinoza often capitalize this "Nature", and I'll just follow their convention to more easily distinguish this sense from the other I wish to talk about. I have no problem with Nature.

My problem is with a different sense of nature, what we might call biological nature. This would essentially include every living organism, all products of biological evolution, life and the processes that sustain it. I would go so far as to say that I hate this nature, and that, ultimately, I would like to redesign its products from scratch.

Here's why. Evolution has produced some remarkable things, no doubt. None of us would be here without it. But evolution is a blind, unintelligent force. As I like to explain in my teaching, evolution is simply the result of things not dying off until after they have in some way perpetuated themselves. Natural selection weeds out only the most pernicious combinations of genes. Thus, the bulk of the genetic material in organisms is entirely superfluous. Synthetic biologists are coming to realize this as they try to create organisms without all the useless clutter.

For example, there is no reason why organisms should age. Aging is simply the product of the accumulation of harmful mutations within species and individuals. Complex life is self-repairing. The only reason we become old and decrepit is because our mechanisms of self-repair eventually break down over time. With the right treatments, however, aging should be completely reversible.

In short, biological nature produces that which is barely good enough, while at the same time producing much that is not going to be successful at passing on its genes. If that weren't bad enough, what does perpetuate often does so out of dumb luck, chance, or contingency--whatever you want to call it. Adaptations are real, but they are always imperfect, the creation of a blind, idiotic force.

Let me be more specific and talk about human beings. Most of us are full of defects and inefficiencies that cause us no end of suffering. Evolution, like the rest of nature, is totally indifferent to our well-being. Some people are born with robust temperaments that allow them to resist the various ills of the world, but many of us are not so fortunate. Some people are such that they will suffer no matter what their circumstances. (I sometimes feel as though I should be included here, because despite having never undergone significant hardship, the bulk of my life has probably been miserable.)

That which we call happiness, flourishing, or even a meaningful and fulfilled life, is on one level a complex, ongoing (but never permanent) series of neuro-chemical reactions. Some people are lucky to have brains which easily produce such states of affairs, but most of us are not. Similarly, some people experience many great external goods in their lives, while others get shafted. Because even Nature is indifferent to us, there is no guarantee that decent people will have tolerable lives. (Plus, whether or not a person is morally decent is itself a product of various contingencies; there is such a thing as "moral luck": some people have to face situations in which whatever course of action they choose will result in some significant ill.)

Biological nature has produced but one thing which may be able to redeem it: intelligence. With intelligence, the world can be reordered in such a way so that suffering is not so ubiquitous and so that so many human desires are not left unsatisfied. Thanks to products of intelligence such as civilization, science, technology, and medicine, we may some day be able to reproduce far more readily the complex chemical reactions which constitute meaningful, happy existence. Whether this be through the use of drugs, genetic augmentations, or integration with our machines is really a matter of indifference. However, if we leave things to chance, if we refuse to tamper with nature, then many of us will continue to lead miserable existences. I would sooner die than embrace that nature.

I think there are primarily two reasons why people put trust in nature and want not to tamper with the natural order. On the one hand, they assume that the universe is not indifferent, but that it somehow cares for human affairs. The easiest way to believe this is to believe in a powerful entity with a human-like psychology that created nature for the sake of human good. (Now is not the time to argue against the existence of a benevolent God, but one would think experience would offer more than enough examples to show that even if such magical beings existed, they don't give a damn about what happens to you.)

But even the more secular among us might still attribute benevolence of a sort to nature, by misunderstanding evolution, thinking of it as quasi-teleological, shaping species in ways that are for their own good. But evolution has only predisposed us to survive long enough to reproduce, and even then, many of us will fail at this task. There's no reason to believe that nature will lead human beings to flourishing without our active intervention.

The second reason people put trust in nature is because it has produced an order that works "for the most part". We have often seen that tampering with this order produces undesired consequences. But this is merely a problem of lack of knowledge. Once we understand the workings of nature sufficiently well, we should in time be able to repair any of the damage that we cause in trying to change it. And the only way to learn how to do such things is to experiment, and to try and see what we can do.

Some people may be content to leave well enough alone. But I, and many like me, never will. Life sucks, but it doesn't have to. Knowledge is power, and its power confers upon us a responsibility to reorder the world in ways that are more conducive to our flourishing, and to the well being of other sentient species. Pain and suffering have their uses in the current scheme of things, but they are merely a cruel side effect, a gross excrescence of the natural order. They are no more necessary than any other of the ills in the world.

Look, people, it's this simple. If we don't play God, nobody else will. Nobody is coming to save us. Nature is just going to do its thing, and unless we are willing to make chance and contingency our objects of worship, then we would do well to embrace intelligence, foresight, and knowledge as the keys to making a better world. Anything less is a complete abdication of our duties.

Ours is a simple choice: dumb luck or intelligent foresight, nature or civilization, passivity or progress.

Obligatory Prediction Post

2008-11-03T22:20:00.000-08:00

Tonight, I am down with O.P.P., an obligatory post predicting the results of the coming day's election. Sorry for no fancy map graphics, but I'm not so well-versed in the blogging arts that I can conjure up such phantasms.

I'm just going to do the Presidential and the Senate races, because I don't really care about the House (though I suspect a gain of a few dozen seats for the Dems). I'm doing the calculations in my head, so someone please inform me if I omit a state or screw up my math.

(My thanks go primarily to fivethirtyeight.com for the information on which these predictions were made. It is a superlative political blog that may well be worth frequenting even after election season ends.)

Popular Vote: Obama 53% McCain 45% Other 2%
Electoral College:
Obama 393 (Kerry states + NV, CO, NM, IA, VA, NC, OH, FL, MO, IN, GA, MT)
McCain 145 (AK, AZ, UT, ID, WY, ND, SD, NE, KS, OK, TX, LA, MS, AL, SC, AR, TN, KY, WV)

Senate:
58 D, 2 I, 40 R
Republican Pick-ups: None
Democratic Pick-ups: VA, NM, CO, NH, AK, OR, NC, MN, GA

In short, an Obama landslide and a filibuster-proof Senate majority. There's probably some wishful thinking here, but I suspect that being burned in the last two presidentials has made many on the left overly pessimistic.

Link of Questionable Value

2008-10-12T14:07:00.000-07:00

Some Luddite propaganda from the NYT:

We are living, we have long been told, in the Information Age. Yet now we are faced with the sickening suspicion that technology has run ahead of us. Man is a fire-stealing animal, and we can’t help building machines and machine intelligences, even if, from time to time, we use them not only to outsmart ourselves but to bring us right up to the doorstep of Doom.

We are still fearful, superstitious and all-too-human creatures. At times, we forget the magnitude of the havoc we can wreak by off-loading our minds onto super-intelligent machines, that is, until they run away from us, like mad sorcerers’ apprentices, and drag us up to the precipice for a look down into the abyss.

As the financial experts all over the world use machines to unwind Gordian knots of financial arrangements so complex that only machines can make — “derive” — and trade them, we have to wonder: Are we living in a bad sci-fi movie? Is the Matrix made of credit default swaps?

Seriously, dude, you're going to blame the financial crisis on the machines? Why do some people hate robots so much? Why is that form of prejudice so socially acceptable in this country?

I'd be more inclined to blame the human beings who used these tools, not the tools themselves. But what do I know? I'm a crazy, radical techno-apologist after all, a Gaius Baltar wannabe.

Democrats Better for the Economy?

2008-09-02T02:56:00.000-07:00

This piece from the New York Times is a must-read. It summarizes the argument of a forthcoming book by Larry Bartels entitled Unequal Democracy.

It supports something that I've believed, but not really had strong evidence for, namely, that Republican economic policies increase inequality. However, above and beyond that, it suggests that Democrats are actually more effective with the economy overall. Here, the author details two key facts emerging from the economic data:

I call the first fact the Great Partisan Growth Divide. Simply put, the United States economy has grown faster, on average, under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.

The stark contrast between the whiz-bang Clinton years and the dreary Bush years is familiar because it is so recent. But while it is extreme, it is not atypical. Data for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.

[...]

The second big historical fact, which might be called the Great Partisan Inequality Divide, is the focus of Professor Bartels’s work.

It is well known that income inequality in the United States has been on the rise for about 30 years now — an unsettling development that has finally touched the public consciousness. But Professor Bartels unearths a stunning statistical regularity: Over the entire 60-year period, income inequality trended substantially upward under Republican presidents but slightly downward under Democrats, thus accounting for the widening income gaps over all. And the bad news for America’s poor is that Republicans have won five of the seven elections going back to 1980.

Now, some caution in interpreting these results is in order. Correlation is not causation, and we're dealing with something enormously complex over a relatively short time-span of about 60 years. (Some possible complications: perhaps it takes several years for a president's policies to have any significant impact on the economy; and what about the role of Congress and which party controls it?) Plus, there are many other ways than economic growth that one may use to assess the welfare of a nation.

It may be a stretch to say that Democrats are generally better for the economy, but certainly they are at least comparable, contrary to what Republicans claim. Plus the evidence is quite strong that they are better for reducing inequality, which I would argue is itself valuable because greater equality means greater stability. (And, as Spinoza tells us, stability is the foremost virtue of a good state.)

I may have to check this book out. While I'm not a Democrat, I do tend to vote Democratic, and this is certainly useful information to have.

Cromulence

2008-08-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

I'm teaching a "writing-intensive" course this term, and I'm tempted to send my students this:

Funner. Impactful. Blowiest. Territorialism. Multifunctionality. Dialoguey. Dancey. Thrifting. Chillaxing. Anonymized. Interestinger. Wackaloon. Updatelette. Noirish. Huger. Domainless. Delegator. Photocentric. Relationshippy. Bestest. Zoomable.

What do all these words have in common? Someone, somewhere, is using them with a disclaimer like "I know it's not a real word..."

[...]

Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with "I know that's not a real word," hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

Furthermore, those same writers are giving up one of their inalienable rights as English speakers: the right to create new words as they see fit. Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean "cool." By the same token, readers and listeners can decide to adopt or ignore any of these uses or forms.

A shorter, snappier version of David Foster Wallace's "Authority and American Usage"? (Incidentally, I am assigning DFW's essay to my class, in all its 60+ page glory, because it provides a lot of helpful context that this brief newspaper piece lacks the space/time to include. The essay can be found in his non-fiction collection Consider the Lobster, which is filled to the brim with awesomeness.)

For some reason, I've never much used the "not a real word" line--neologisms are fun!--and I was always a little irritated by it (you never see it in academic philosophy, even though you know they're constantly making shit up).

At the same time, I don't want to see my students writing things like "While Kant was perhaps the most impactful writer of the Enlightenment, he was arguably also the blowiest. Dude needed some serious chillaxin'!" True, but ineloquent.

Words of Political Wisdom

2008-08-13T21:02:00.000-07:00

I notice that the last entry I posted, on telco immunity, now sticks out at me in an unpleasant way, particularly since what "must be prevented" was not. This evening, as I was reading Etienne Balibar's short monograph Spinoza and Politics, I happened upon some passages he cites from Spinoza's incomparable Political Treatise. I find them especially relevant:

[W]hen the safety of a state depends on any man's good faith, and its affairs cannot be administered properly unless its rulers choose to act from good faith, it will be very unstable; if a state is to be capable of lasting, its administration must be so organized that it does not matter whether its rulers are led by reason or passion -- they cannot be induced to break faith or act badly. In fact it makes no difference to the stability of a state what motive leads men to conduct its affairs properly, provided that they are conducted properly. For freedom or strength of heart is a private virtue; the virtue of a state is stability.

[...]

[I]f human nature were such that men desired most what was most useful to them, there would be no need of artifice to promote loyalty and concord. But since, it is well known, human nature is very different, it is necessary to organize the state so that all its members, rulers as well as ruled, do what the common welfare requires whether they wish to or not; that is to say, live in accordance with the precept of reason, either spontaneously or through force or necessity. But this only happens when the administration is arranged so that nothing which concerns the common welfare is wholly entrusted to the good faith of any man.

I shall leave interpretation as an exercise for the reader.

Why telecom immunity must be prevented.

2008-07-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald, far and away the most professional and intellectually honest blogger I've ever encountered, has an excellent defense of the rule of law here.

Too many Obama supporters are willing to look the other way on this issue, since he came out in favor of the "compromise". McCain, of course, is far worse on this issue--his recent claim that allowing Guantanamo detainees habeas corpus rights was one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history gives you a sense of where he stands. In short, I can understand why they would want to refrain from criticizing Obama, insofar as they fear it would weaken his electoral prospects and could result in something far worse.

But, as cynical as I may be about a lot of things, there are some principles which I believe should be upheld despite the political repercussions. The rule of law is first and foremost on this list. Early modern philosophers like Spinoza and Locke (who stole many of Spinoza's political ideas without citing him) recognized the corruptibility of humans in power, and sought to establish rules of governance to circumvent this corruption. (Even then this was not a new idea; political principles like the separation of powers can be traced at least as far back as the Roman Republic.)

The authors and advocates of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, for all their imperfections, appreciated how vital the rule of law was for long-term stability and a just society. No human being, no matter how seemingly wise or benevolent, should be entrusted with the powers of a monarch. That includes Obama. (In fact, the only exception I would even consider is if such power was necessary to reinstate the rule of law because of a jaded and distracted populace who failed to recognize its importance.)

If any of this resonates with you, read Greenwald's article. It is well worth your time.

Free Speech on the Internets?

2008-07-06T15:15:00.000-07:00

This article is worth taking a look at. It's a bit lengthy, but it covers a number of different dimensions of a highly complex problem.

I won't speak to all of it, but I'd like to focus on one particular issue:

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world. It's a fallout of the Internet's market-driven growth, but possible remedies, including government regulation, can be worse than the symptoms.

With the exception of the totally unsubstantiated claim that "government regulation" "can be worse", these paragraphs get to the heart of the issue I wish to consider, viz., the downsides of privatization.

Much in the way that an ant colony takes on a life of its own above and beyond those of its ants, corporations develop their own sets of survival instincts and quasi-desires. This is a metaphor, of course, but it does come very close to the truth.

An idea popped into my head just now, and I doubt it's entirely original, but I think it's worth sharing. Multinational corporations are like the modern instantiations of the ancient Greek and Roman gods. They are entities which ostensibly care about human well being, but which have their own interests which tend to take precedence and often have very little to do with what is good for human beings.

They share our world with us, but seem to occupy parts of it that ordinary mortals cannot access. They aren't omniscient or omnipotent, but their capabilities far exceed ours. And they are highly flawed, perhaps even more so than we are.

Similarly, there is a large but finite number of them, and a smaller number still of the most powerful ones. Thus, our options for loyalty end up somewhat limited.

This last point is crucial. Contrary to what free market proponents often suggest, corporate consolidation has left us with very few choices. Let's say that I run an open home network, and that my neighbors and their friends use it to download some copyrighted materials illicitly. If the RIAA and MPAA had their way, an ISP would have to cut off your access entirely if you received three accusations of illegal downloading. That's right, they don't even have to successfully prove anything; you merely have to be accused three times. One of your neighbors downloads the latest Metallica album, a second grabs a bootleg of the new Indiana Jones film, and a third pirates a copy of Photoshop and BOOM! no internet for you!

(If you think I'm making this stuff up, you should read BoingBoing more often... In any case, this is particularly unfortunate because it undermines human courtesy, discouraging people from sharing a resource that they don't fully consume. If not for factors like this, I probably would operate my home network without a password.)

In many areas of the country, broadband markets are monopolized, so your choice is: use this particular ISP, or stick with dial-up (if you can even do that; since in many cases the same company controls broadband and phone service, you might find yourself cut off entirely). If you're kicked off of your area's only ISP, you are shit out of luck.

I would probably die without the Internet. I wish I were kidding. Until recently, I lived alone (for nearly four years), and whenever my connection cut out I was both angry and panicked. The 'net allowed me some means of contact with other human beings, probably saving my sanity. It may be relatively new, but high-speed internet access is now, for many people, a need. (In fact, I think free wireless high-speed internet should be a human right, but that's for another post...)

Now, granted, state institutions and bureaucracies exhibit many of the same characteristics that large corporations do. This is especially so with non-democratic governments. In China's case, for instance, it's clear that government control can be a lot worse than having to deal with private corporations. (The author of our article above fails to make this case, leaving "government regulation" as a vague term that could apply to radically different regimes.)

The key difference, though, is accountability. Corporations are by and large highly undemocratic institutions, beholden only to making profit for their shareholders. Certainly this schema works quite well in a number of areas, but there are some in which it is entirely inappropriate, most notably when we are dealing with common goods.

So, for example, healthcare and other kinds of insurance are worth having insofar as they allow the pooling of risk. The profit motive totally undermines this; huge amounts of time and money are spent not to cover particular expenses and companies try to offer insurance only to those who don't need it. It's highly inefficient, which partly explains why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else, even though its quality of care is comparable, and sometimes worse, than that of other industrialized nations.

A second example is in the cultural sphere, in art and music. Back before today's oppressive copyright regime, artists frequently borrowed images and ideas from their predecessors and contemporaries. Today, you can't even use a 5 second sample from a song without permission. (In fact, according to the AP's idiotic new policy, I shouldn't be able to post quotations from their articles any longer than 5 words, without paying for it. Perhaps I should just split up those two paragraphs into a series of 4-word quotes...) This has driven certain genres of music that depend on practices of sampling and remixing underground. Everyone loses as a consequence (except the huge media conglomerates--who for some reason seem very reluctant to share their ill-gotten gains from suing their customers with the artists they are purportedly protecting).

A third case, the last I'll consider, involves infrastructure. Only the most diehard/insane libertarian wants to privatize the roads. Nevertheless, much of the US infrastructure is crumbling because of moves toward privatization in the past few decades; there's little profit to be had in making sure bridges are safe. So why is it that when it comes to the Internet, the aptly named "information superhighway", that we run almost entirely on privately-owned toll roads?

The fall of Communism as a realistic alternative to Capitalism does not mean that the latter is the best we can do. We should use markets in the places where they are most effective, but not shy away from trying out other models when they are not. If the concern is that governments are inefficient or incompetent, we can always rely on local experimentalism. (Remember "states' rights"? Neither do I...) If a state institution is not producing the effects it is supposed to, you scrap it and try something else.

But even when we do rely on markets, we need to keep corporations in check. They will maximize profits by whatever means they can get away with. (That's not a statement about "evil CEOs" but rather about the nature of the system, and the ways it promotes some kinds of behavior over others.) It's the state's job to set the rules and enforce them so that corporate interests don't trump human ones.

Why is that so difficult for some people to swallow? I don't understand how you can be totally distrustful of one large set of institutions (government) and totally trusting of another (the market). (I mean, at least most first world governments are ostensibly democratic.) As with any powerful entities, we should set them up in opposition to each other to ensure that none becomes too strong. But instead, we get them colluding while most citizens are too fat and entertained to really care.

(Hmmm... This is not the most coherent post I've ever written. I need to refine some of these thoughts, but I might as well publish it as is for now.)

In Defense of Hypocrisy

2008-07-03T16:10:00.001-07:00

[This entry is something I originally posted on another (private) blog of mine, with a few minor edits. I was prompted to write it after recent incidents involving presidential candidate Barack Obama and popular website BoingBoing, both of whom have been mercilessly accused of hypocrisy in the recent past. The cases aren't really equivalent--I think Obama is actually more deserving of the epithet--but I did get sick of all the drama.]

Yes, that's right, I'm going to defend hypocrisy.

A lot of otherwise nonjudgmental people seem very quick to throw out this particular accusation. Nobody likes a hypocrite, but why? I think it's time to challenge some assumptions.

The first problem with calling people out on hypocrisy is that we're all hypocrites (for example: I have in the past and probably will in the future call people out for hypocrisy). Many of us have at least a few strong ideals that we will share with other people from time to time, but we're all of us imperfect, human: we don't always live up to our values, although we're very good at making excuses for ourselves when we fail.

There's been some social scientific research on hypocrisy, but I don't feel like looking it up and you probably don't feel like reading it. Suffice to say, from what I have perused, there's evidence (surprise, surprise!) that hypocrisy is quite common, for just about everyone. But we all know this, anyway, from experience, so I'll move on.

At this point you may object: "Sure, we're all hypocrites sometimes, but some are bigger than others. Nobody listens to me, but public figures can have a lot of influence on other people, and there's nothing worse than them telling others not to do things that they themselves do."

My response to this brings me to my second point. Sometimes it's okay to hold different people by different standards. (In fact, the very objection hypothetically posed presupposes that public figures be held to a different standard than private citizens.)

Take Al Gore as an example. He travels around the world a lot, doing his slideshow and so forth, to try to convince people of the enormity of human-caused global warming and to inspire them to take action against it. Since he doesn't have a magical zero-emissions jet, his carbon footprint is rather considerable.

Now let's pretend (counterfactually; in truth, Gore spends large amounts of money to offset his carbon footprint) that he ignored this fact and continued to do his slideshow all over the world. Has our hypothetical Gore lost all credibility because he's a hypocrite?

In a world of black-and-white morals (like Tennessee, perhaps), that might be the case. I don't know how many times I've heard arguments to this effect: "Don't trust Noam Chomsky; he hasn't given up all his positions to go live on an anarchosyndicalist commune!" But in the real world, sometimes you have to do things you don't approve of in order to accomplish things you value more. Gore has changed so many other people's behavior that his effect will be a net positive regardless of what he does.

Take another, less controversial example. Let's say that you really support candidate X or proposition Y and spend large amounts of effort, time, and money to convince people to vote for him/her/it. Voting day comes around, and you suffer a lapse of energy, deciding to stay home instead of going out to the polls. As it happens, the race is close (say 100 votes), but your desired outcome is achieved. (Elections are almost never decided by a single vote.) Would you be a hypocrite in this case? In a sense, yes, but you still achieved more good than if you had merely voted without campaigning. (In presidential elections, this is more excusable for people who don't live in swing states.)

In short, people's circumstances often differ. We live in an egalitarian-minded society, but few ethical rules can be applied uniformly without consideration for the situation. When the actions of a mass of people easily outweigh those of an individual, hypocrisy isn't all that bad (except to the extent that it does in fact undermine your credibility, reducing your potential impact).

Third, and finally, accusations of hypocrisy are often leveled as excuses for one's own questionable behavior. In logic, there is a seldom invoked fallacy called "tu quoque", which is just Latin for "you too", that applies to charges of hypocrisy. It's an instance of ad hominem, in which you attack the speaker rather than what s/he says. Wikipedia has a decent article on it, so let me copy their formulation. The following argument is invalid:

A makes criticism P.
A is guilty of P.
Therefore, P is dismissed.

I see this a ton on political blogs. "The Republicans are telling us not to use 527s to smear them? But what about the Swiftboat Vets, etc.? If they can do it, we certainly can too!" This is one reason the high road is seldom taken in politics.

But you can see how easily this can be used to rationalize a person's behavior. In the previous example, if dirty politics is wrong in one case, then it's still wrong for you to do it even if your opponent does it and at the same time says not to do it. It may make it easier on your conscience, but just because large numbers of people do something does not make it right. (Two wrongs don't make a right, as it is often said but seldom practiced. :-) )

In this case, in fact, the accusers are being doubly hypocritical. First, for trying to justify their use of practice Z, which they otherwise say is wrong, and second, for accusing another person of being a hypocrite while themselves being hypocritical ("meta-hypocrisy" you might call it).

Look what has happened here, though. In all the accusations back and forth of hypocrisy, the real moral issues at stake have been lost sight of. Instead of discussing the appropriateness of policy T, we end up discussing whether minor infraction U counts as a violation of principle V, thereby making actor W a hypocrite. While these kinds of social games may be fun (and increase TV ratings), they are totally counterproductive.

So the next time you feel the urge to accuse someone of hypocrisy, stop a moment and think if it really matters. (Just because everyone else likes to yell "hypocrite!"--including me, at least sometimes--doesn't make it right, after all.) If it's an issue that you care about, playing the hypocrisy game will be self-defeating. More likely than not it will serve as a distraction, leaving the undesirable status quo in place. Why not just focus on what's objectionable about the policy position, behavior, or whatever, that's in question?

What's so bad about partisan politics?

2008-06-21T19:24:00.000-07:00

Obama's recent selling out of the Constitution and the rule of law has served as a wake-up call for me. If you think that means I'm not going to vote for him, though, you are mistaken. Rather, it has helped me to put his claims of a new kind of politics into a more helpful perspective.

Part of Obama's appeal, which I until recently was also influenced by, is his renunciation of the old way of doing things in Washington. His call for a new kind of politics he likes to bill as post-partisan, as transcending the divisions of red and blue, Republican and Democrat, and the like. While he identifies the proper source of frustration, he misinterprets what is objectionable about it. What we need is not less partisanship, but more. Here's why.

Following Chantal Mouffe--whose work, specifically her 2005 book On the Political, I was prompted to return to after recent events--I would distinguish between three models of democratic politics: the aggregative, the deliberative, and the agonistic. The first two are versions of liberalism, in the sense it is used in political theory, an individualistic, rationalistic view that sees the goal of politics as compromise (aggregative) or consensus (deliberative).

The precise differences between the two views are not important for my purposes here. The primary distinction I wish to draw is between the liberal and agonistic models. Mouffe advocates what I like to call the "Ant-eater Model of Democracy" (to my knowledge, this is an original formulation, the cleverness of which is no small point of pride, as shall be seen). Partly following conservative theorist Carl Schmitt, Mouffe defines the political realm as the space of conflict and antagonism. People disagree about how society is to be organized, about how things ought to be arranged to allow for human coexistence. Politics is the set of practices designed to make decisions in this realm among options which are mutually exclusive.

The problem with consensus-based views, such as the one advocated by Obama and many Democrats, is that they fail to recognize that any consensus is necessarily exclusive. Dissent does not disappear in this model; it is merely concealed, relegated to the margins. This has dangerous consequences, because it leaves those who do dissent with the feeling that they are not being heard, leading to disillusionment and apathy toward the political process.

Take the example of the American military empire. No national politician of any prominence can argue that we should drastically reduce military spending and close all of the unnecessary bases that we maintain around the world. This view as seen as illegitimate, as out-of-bounds for "serious" political discussion in the US. Consequently, those of us who understandably question this state of affairs, have no real political outlet for our dissent. (I'm not saying that we're right about this necessarily, but simply that it should be regarded as a legitimate point of disagreement.)

What recourse are we left with? We can rant and rave on the Internet, call our elected representatives, picket and protest--but to no real effect. It's not surprising that people with strong principles find themselves frustrated with our political process, and become disillusioned and apathetic. This is where we come to Mouffe's Ant-eater Model. She makes a distinction between antagonism--a relationship between enemies who view their opponents as a threat to their coexistence, meaning they can only be dealt with by force--and agonism, a relation between adversaries who view their opponents as having legitimate dissenting views, and who participate in a process which decides between their conflicting positions.

If you are my enemy, I cannot engage you as an equal; I either ignore you or push you aside or, in the worst case, try to kill you. If you are my adversary, the way we resolve our disputes does not involve violence or coercion, but the use of practices and institutions which resolve conflicts and make decisions non-violently. Democracy, on Mouffe's formulation, seeks to transform antagonism into agonism (hence, democracy as "ant"-eater). Democracy is the legitimation of dissent, to borrow a common formulation. It's how we coexist without having to resort to violence.

Returning to our central question: what exactly is so objectionable about the way national politics has been done in this country? The problem is not disagreement per se, but the form which that disagreement takes. Arguments ignore the issues, focus on the petty and the superficially personal; we get "spin" and sniping between parties, the elevation of minutiae to a position of eminent newsworthiness. The differences between the two political parties are often blurred or effectively non-existent--this certainly seemed to be the case in 2000, and while things have changed, the range of opinion that is deemed legitimate is still far too narrow.

While governing coalitions, blocks which can make up majorities, are necessary parts of a parliamentary system, there's no reason that these coalitions must be single political parties. In other democracies with multiparty systems and proportional representation, people in specific minorities can find politicians and parties who come much closer to representing their views. Our choice, however, is between Coke and Pepsi, which does us little good if we don't particularly care for either. Sure, there may be substantial differences between the two on important matters (like who, if anyone, we to go war with) which make it reasonable to prefer the one to the other, but that doesn't reduce our dissatisfaction if neither cares about certain issues of great personal importance to us.

This is not to say that, in the US case, one must then side with the various ineffectual third parties. We at least have a primary election system which allows us to influence the shape that the different political parties take. I'm inclined to think that proportional representation, public financing of elections, viable third parties, and other such reforms would make for a stronger democracy, but unfortunately we don't have the option of starting over again from scratch. (Should something drastic like this occur, it would undoubtedly not be a matter of choice.)

Working within the system and changing the system needn't be mutually exclusive. I think a lot of the leftist "netroots" enacts such a philosophy by supporting those Democratic Party candidates who most closely share their vision. Similarly, it's possible to have legitimate disputes on issues, and substantive differences between parties, without resorting to spin, personal aspersions, and all of the other objectionable tactics that color contemporary political discourse.

In short, what we need is not a post-partisan politics. As this most recent debacle has reminded us, there will always be differences of opinion, even among allies. Rather, we need a kind of smart partisanship, that eschews the dirty tactics and the commitment to pursuing political power at any cost, and gradually replaces it with a system that gives voters more real choices, by means of electoral and media reforms and the like.

(And if that doesn't work, that's when I call in the robots.)

"Arguments" Against Enhancement

2008-05-21T15:50:00.001-07:00

Last week I had the intellectual opportunity of a lifetime: a special invitation to an intensive 4-day faculty seminar on my main topic of interest, human enhancement technologies (HET). Without exception (excluding perhaps myself), everyone in the seminar had a fascinating and sophisticated take on the issues at stake. With their acute intellects and their intimidatingly large knowledge bases, the participants in the seminar taught me a ton about the issues surrounding enhancement.

Nevertheless (and not surprising to any student of human nature), my strong opinions have not really changed. I'm a little more skeptical both of what will be possible in the near future and of how desirable the transformations that enhancement promises will be in a larger social context. In truth, I think the only compelling arguments against it would be ones that emphasize negative social consequences.

As an illustration of the uncompelling fare usually offered, I will consider four claims, helpfully crystallized by our discussions, which are often invoked as reasons to oppose HET. I consider these to be non-arguments (hence my scare quotes above), which play upon strong emotions and vague moral intuitions for rhetorical efficacy. There are four, having to do with: God, nature, hubris, and dignity. As it turns out, these are often cited not just with respect to HETs, but for just about anything, technological or otherwise, which could lead to massive social change. In short, these are four conservative "arguments" seeking to maintain the status quo (or, in more reactionary forms, hoping to reinstate a nostalgic golden age that never was).

Playing God

This first is the easiest to debunk, but annoyingly perhaps the one most commonly cited by lay people. In general, the claim is that {genetic screening, therapeutic cloning, creating human/non-human hybrids, stem cell research, etc.} is contrary to God's will, or something which only he is allowed to tamper with.

Like any argument purporting to know the will of God, the burden of proof lies with the one making the claim. Since there is no way to prove either that (their) God exists or that such-and-such is what that God wants, this kind of claim has to rely on faith. In a secular liberal democracy, that is by itself insufficient reason for opposing a policy.

(To the extent that "playing God" is meant to be a metaphor for human beings taking on a power of which they are not worthy, it turns out to be another version of the hubris argument which I consider below.)

It's Unnatural!

This is similar to the God argument in that it tries to bring in some super-human authority, in this case "Nature", to justify an individual's personal prejudices. Whenever something being "unnatural" is cited as a reason for opposition, rest assured that some mistake is being committed. I've contemplated teaching a class just on this subject ("What is nature/natural/unnatural?")--and I think I could find enough material to do so, given the huge amount of confusion that exists--but I will keep my response here as brief as possible.

The "naturalistic fallacy" is a name often given to the kind of mistake being made here, although admittedly the specific designation of that term (and whether it is even fallacious) is disputed by philosophers. (Yeah, I know, big surprise!) As the term is usually used, it refers to the unwarranted leap from "is" statements (descriptive claims) to "ought" statements (normative claims). In general, regardless of what you call it, the mistake typically involves confusing the descriptive with the normative in some way or another.

This confusion is bad enough, but even greater is to be found when we consider the wide range of meanings given to the term "natural". If people used the term "natural" in the way that, say, physicists used it, applying to everything that actually exists, then everything we find in the world is natural. This is the sense that Spinoza uses when he talks about nature, importantly noting that good and bad, i.e., normative concepts, are not by nature. It would be simple to see how to debunk the naturalistic fallacy if this were the only thing people meant.

However, this is not the way in which the term is usually used. In the "natural law" tradition, a very different kind of moral interpretation is offered (often associated with Catholicism). To the extent that this is a religious theory, it amounts to another case of the "playing God" non-argument. In non-theological applications, the question that arises is this: can we furnish definitions of the terms "natural" and "unnatural" that have moral connotations that can be applied consistently and without begging the question (i.e., just equating "natural" and "moral" by stipulation).

A number of articles have been written on this issue, although the ones I've seen have taken the term as it applies to homosexuality (homosexual behavior is wrong, the "argument" goes, because it is unnatural). The authors, defending the permissibility of homosexuality, will go through as many different senses of natural as they can, showing that no definition can be consistently applied.

For example: if by "unnatural" one means "artificial", then anything made by humans (i.e., most of civilization) would also be immoral; if "unnatural" means "something that non-human animals do not do", the fact of homosexual behavior among penguins, bonobos, and numerous other animals would make homosexuality moral but, again, much of human society immoral; if one defines "unnatural" as that which provokes disgust, then this would not only leave it open to individual differences but would tend to make things like cleaning toilets immoral; if it means "unusual" or "uncommon" (i.e., if "natural" is taken in the sense of "normal"), then any human idiosyncrasy becomes unethical, while many common vices become perfectly acceptable; and so on. While not entirely parallel, a similar analysis can be applied to HETs.

In short, it is insufficient to oppose research into and use of HETs simply because they are "unnatural". Other reasons must be given and must be able to be applied consistently to other areas (otherwise, we're merely creating masks for our prejudices). Remember: just because something is natural, does not mean it is good.

Hubris

This term comes to us from Greek tragedy, usually referring to the tragic flaw that a dramatic protagonists suffers from which leads to his or her downfall. "Overweening pride" is a common definition of hubris. HETs are not only called "hubristic" but are sometimes said to express an obsessive human drive for "control" or "domination" or "mastery over nature". Generally speaking, under this heading I include any claim that amounts to: we are messing with powerful forces beyond our understanding that we foolishly think we can control.

(As an aside, one can find an interesting conflict in the Christian tradition on this point. Human beings are given by God dominion over the natural world, over all animals, vegetables, minerals, etc. However, pride is a great sin, Lucifer's sin and arguably a component of Adam and Eve's original sin. So, does our mastery over nature entitle us to manipulate it, say, at a genetic level? The Bible cannot answer this question conclusively, not only because it contains conflicting, even contradictory, passages, but also because it was written long before people even knew what "genes" were.)

Following Spinoza (and Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others), I do not see pride as a vice, nor humility as a virtue. It is possible to be overly proud, but what is ideal is having pride commensurate to one's capacities. It is good to know both our capabilities and our limitations. On the opposite end of the spectrum from hubris is excessive humility, which can prevent us from taking actions we should otherwise take. Believing oneself incapable of something is often sufficient to render oneself actually incapable. The point is: trying to control nature is not by itself a bad thing--in fact, we do it all the time--and there are times when we know well enough to do so, particularly if some greater good prompts us to act under uncertainty (and, in truth, we always act with some degree of uncertainty; none of us predict the future all that well). Don't forget: Hamlet also had his tragic flaw.

That said, the hubris "argument", unlike the previous two, actually offers an important lesson. We should not overhype our abilities, we should not presume that our technologies can satisfy all of our desires. Granted, but I would argue that human enhancement should only be developed with an eye to safety concerns and its potential social impact. We should use science and other cognitive tools to understand as well as we can, but just because there will always remain unknowns does not mean we should not act on our best information. Calling something "hubris" is effectively throwing in the towel, preempting inquiry before it even gets started.

I'm inclined to think that most people who accuse scientists of hubris simply are not aware of the vast extent of what we now know and what we are capable of doing with this knowledge. It's easy to throw up one's hands, especially if one occupies a privileged socioeconomic position, and argue that we should just "play it safe". However, refusal to change might just mean our downfall. Assuming everything will turn out OK if we leave well enough alone is simply not justified, especially if we recognize that evolutionary solutions to problems of survival are the products of blind trial and error. Just because something has worked or is working does not mean it will continue to work in the future. (In Enhancing Evolution, John Harris makes an excellent argument to this effect against what's often called the "precautionary principle".)

An Affront to Dignity

Dignity. There are few words in the English language that are so vague. Steven Pinker, in an excellent piece for The New Republic, makes a case for "The Stupidity of Dignity". His primary argument is that this nebulous quality is ethically unnecessary and, in the very least, should take backseat to more rigorous notions such as autonomy and respect for persons. If we don't even know what dignity is (is it something that everyone possesses equally, or can it be increased or decreased by what one does or by what one is supposed to endure?), we should not use it as a reason to oppose a policy which has the potential to do tremendous good.

Frankly, even if I ignore issues of vagueness, I simply don't see how HETs threaten dignity (just like I can't see how gay marriage is detrimental to the traditional institution of marriage). Adversity will never be eliminated from the human condition, nor death, nor suffering. We will always have limits. The quest for enhancement is not a quest for perfection, but for making life better. It may lead to new and unusual forms of life, but that does not effect the ethical worth of traditional forms.

As Pinker points out, dignity is not the sole human good, and ascriptions of dignity are extremely subjective. If we believe in a liberal democratic system in which individuals are as free as possible to determine their own conceptions of the good--to take a page from Rawls--then forcing everyone to conform to a moral standard of dignity is highly questionable.

***

Now, all this is not to say that there are no good reasons for opposing human enhancement. There may well be, perhaps even ones that could convince me. Nevertheless, using loaded terms like God, nature, hubris, and dignity adds little to the debate. (Conversely, merely invoking "freedom of choice" or a "right to bodily self-determination" is insufficient for justifying the use of HETs. There may be conflicts with other rights or freedoms that could take precedence.)

Bonus: Equality

A fifth claim against HETs is that they will heighten inequality (and hence, lead to conflicts and undermine democratic institutions). I think there is something to this argument, but that it too fails. I'll briefly say why.

Equality is an ideal. By nature, human beings differ in many qualities and there's no reason to think that everything balances out in the end. Social programs and environmental interventions can redress some differences, but it cannot change biological potentials. Whether we wish to admit it or not, there is a genetic lottery. With respect to our initial genetic makeup, some people get all the breaks, others several, most of us probably a couple, and some virtually none.

To use a personal example. I'm very lucky to be born with naturally high intellectual abilities. I'm smart, through no doing of my own. (I've seen enough cases of people who work harder than I do but who still cannot best me in many intellectual endeavors.) I'm grateful for that, but when I look around me I see mostly other smart people (because of where I live and work), and some of those people also have other talents which I lack. They are more creative, or more socially adept, or in better shape, or taller, or upbeat by disposition.

This last one, disposition or temperament, I cannot stress the importance of enough. Whether you have a sunny or a cloudy disposition colors the entirety of your experience. Some people lacking other talents can persevere simply because they are naturally resilient. This is grossly unfair.

Why do we ignore these natural inequalities when people complain about the "unfairness" of using steroids in professional sports or popping Ritalin before a test? People are no more responsible for their "natural gifts" than they are for whatever artificial means they use to boost themselves. But even if we consider something like how hard somebody works--because we think people who work hard deserve good things--we should ask, how did they acquire this predilection? Even if a work ethic is something largely socially determined, there is still a difference between people raised in different environments. Should I be blamed for not being raised to appreciate the value of hard work?

In truth, if equality is an ideal that we maintain, then the most egalitarian course of action is wide-scale funding for HETs, and subsidies to ensure that every individual can have the enhancements he or she wants. Trying to ban HETs will create a black market, raising costs and decreasing safety while simultaneously assuring that only a small elite will have access to them. (Even worse, this elite will be by definition law-breakers, meaning that they may find it easier to break other laws in the future.)

We should admit to ourselves that the main reason many of us oppose HETs is because we find them weird and unsettling; they are something radically new, something we aren't used to, and therefore something that frightens many of us. Let's stop dressing up these fears by invoking values which we apply selectively to rule out the things we just happen not to like.

If you don't want to enhance yourself, no one is forcing you too. But I do. So lay off!

On the Evolution of Intelligent Life

2008-05-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

Nick Bostrom, philosopher and transhumanist from Oxford, has penned an excellent analysis of why it might in fact be better if life were not found on Mars. His reasoning is not entirely without problems--he's (still) only human after all--but I think he covers most of the important bases.

Thinking about the distant future is extremely difficult, but worthwhile if we have any concern for the future of our species or our civilization (not necessarily identical). Even if technology is not advancing at an exponential rate as some technooptimists proclaim, the pace of discovery and invention seems to be accelerating and will likely create for us problems we've never before faced. It would be nice to have some foresight, perhaps to take preventative measures against major threats.

A lot of future forecasting is a probability game, and one in which we have no idea what the real figures might be. Even if we could determine them, would it do us any good? A 1-in-a-million chance may seem highly unlikely, but given the vastness of the universe, such happenings are rather frequent. We can scarcely fathom the difference between 1-in-a-million and 1-in-a-trillion, but the probabilities we're dealing with are probably more infinitesimal by many orders of magnitude. However--and this is key--if the universe is truly infinite, anything that is possible will exist somewhere or other. We have no way of determining whether our case is unexceptional or nearly impossible.

With those caveats in mind, Bostrom still offers some helpful insights on the basis of his notion of a Great Filter. Think of it as a kind of "natural selection" for advanced civilizations. Since the universe has existed for much longer than we or our evolutionary predecessors have, it is quite likely that if the genesis of intelligent life were not so improbable, we would find instances of it. But SETI has yielded nothing. (See the article for further elaboration; I'm skipping some of the finer points.) This means that the emergence of intelligent organisms and cultures is unlikely--but for what reasons? It may be that the hard part is getting self-replication going. Once that happens, intelligent and eventually space-faring life might be virtually inevitable (so long as the planet on which it arises is not destroyed or otherwise rendered uninhabitable in the meanwhile).

Still, even if the jump from non-life to life is tremendous, the jump from intelligent life to space colonization could itself be as tremendous, or more so. (To a certain extent, this seems to me unlikely: we probably now have the means to start colonies on the moon and Mars, but lack sufficient motivation for doing so. In the very least, it's something that we could accomplish within a couple decades. At this point, no technology we have created makes it inevitable that expansion into space be precluded.)

The upshot of the discussion is this: is it possible for any sufficiently advanced civilization to escape destruction at its own hands? Or is the relationship between intelligent life and technology like that of the necromancer devoured by summoned demons he could not control? Can a civilization colonize other parts of space allowing it to persist even if its home planet is destroyed? And how likely is this kind of existential catastrophe anyway? Since most of us will not be colonists, it would be nice to know about these potential global cataclysms. (The greatest ones which are now being developed make nuclear weapons look like children's toys. Self-replication, in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and AI, are much more potent threats, because self-replicating things multiply at an exponential rate and could quickly overwhelm us. See Bill Joy's article from the April 2000 issue of Wired.)

It may well be that we face such existential threats in our lifetime. One error in the laboratory could eradicate us before we even knew what was happening. Even if this is extremely unlikely, it only has to happen once to kill us all. We would be foolish not to try to predict and prevent such possibilities as far as is possible. Thus, if we find no life anywhere else in the observed universe, it may just mean that we've already overcome the hard, astronomically improbable parts, and it may be smooth sailing from here on out. Then again...

Obama's Speech on Race

2008-03-19T01:20:00.000-07:00

Race is an issue that I don't often talk about. Like a lot of white men, I tend not to think of myself in racial terms (or gender terms for that matter) while I generally try my best to treat everyone as equals regardless of the color of their skin or any other physical characteristic.

The metaphor of navigating a minefield here is as apt as it is frequently invoked. When I have discussed matters related to race in the past, I have no doubt that I've made an occasional misstep, uttering remarks which may have been racially insensitive. I honestly regret the offense I may have caused anyone at those times.

Despite the dangers involved, it would be a mistake never to speak about race, because it is clearly something that plays a significant role in American life, whether we like it or not. This is why Barack Obama's speech on the issue, an extremely powerful statement that did not shy away from tackling it head on, is so important and so necessary.

I strongly encourage you, if you have not already done so, to take a look at the speech, or at least read the transcript. I will offer my thoughts as I do in this forum, but I think it best for people to form their own opinions by going to the source without the distorting influence of pre-given interpretations by others. Of course we always carry with us preconceptions and prejudices, but there is nevertheless a value in trying to approach things with an open mind.

From here on, I will assume the reader has experienced the speech firsthand.

As I perused the Internet after reading it, looking at editorials and analyses as well as comments on these pieces from anonymous netizens, I found that most people's responses fell into one of two groups. In one, there was the expression of a kind of ecstatic hope, an almost religious feeling of being uplifted and deeply touched by his sentiments. The other consisted of vociferous anger directed at perceived contradictions accompanied with disgust that so many people could be "duped" by Obama's rhetoric. Given such strong and opposite reactions, what are we to make of this speech?

It should go without saying that one's prior feelings about Obama play a significant role here. Those who support his candidacy will almost invariably find his words inspirational, while those who oppose him will more than likely be upset and dismissive. These two groups hear in Obama's oration what they want and expect to hear, and by and large would react in a similar way even if it had taken any number of other forms.

(This is not to suggest that there aren't people who defy these expectations. A substantial number of people offered good reasons to justify their emotional responses. In taking up the stance I am now, I'm writing as though I did not fall into either of these groups. This is not entirely true, however, because I decided a few weeks ago, albeit with some reluctance, to back Obama. This speech put a number of my worries about him to rest, but I can't deny that I went into the experience with a generally positive outlook.)

At any rate, the most informative responses, I believe, will be those coming from people who, up until now, did not feel strongly one way or another. I came across a few of these. Some who were undecided said they were touched and that this made the decision for them. Even some previously ardent Clinton supporters seemed to find themselves torn between the two candidates after hearing Obama's moving words. At the same time, I saw reports of others who reacted with discomfort, who were uneasy about dwelling on these difficult contradictions in American life. Some thought race was not really an important issue and were unhappy that this much attention was being focused on it.

Even though I saw fewer of these, the variety of responses from people in this group was significantly greater, and unsurprisingly I was unable to discern any general trends from the small, unrepresentative sample I encountered. In the coming days and weeks, we'll see polls and eventually primary results which will give us a better sense of the larger impact.

Right now, it's anyone's guess what shape that impact will have. It's clear that Obama took some serious risks--he wrote the speech himself and delivered it without vetting it before focus groups or taking polls to see how people would react--and decided to communicate what he actually felt with a candor almost unprecedented in the politics of our time.

He defied the expectations of many "savvy" political commentators and reporters (many of whom seemed to entirely miss the central points of the speech) and actually addressed the issues with a degree of subtlety and nuance that presupposed that Americans are intelligent and reasonable enough to make complex judgments about almost intractable moral and political problems. Perhaps he overestimated the ability of most Americans, but it's painfully obvious that too much of the news media and far too many politicians underestimate it, perhaps grossly.

I found Obama's speech to be both brilliant and inspirational, and perhaps one of the greatest speeches in modern American history, for at least three reasons, which I'll share.

First, he was able to draw parallels between black experience and white experience, showing how both groups are capable of racist thinking, while giving an account of why such thinking occurs and acknowledging that it won't disappear over night. At the same time, he called on both groups to take responsibility and not to blame members of another race for the problems they face.

Instead, he deflected the blame to the unchecked greed and unregulated excesses of corporate America. This was a master stroke, both because it acknowledges that human beings need to blame someone for their problems, and because more people now are being pressed economically and are all too aware of Wall St.'s misdeeds with the recent financial bail-outs making the news. In addition to being strategically brilliant, it has the added virtue of being true.

Second, Obama showed, once again, how the politics of hope can overcome the politics of fear. Spinoza, in addition to penning the highly relevant quotation I cite in my header (the one that acknowledges that reason alone is insufficient to sway people, but must also have an affective, emotional dimension), rightly argued that hope and fear are the two most powerful emotions politically. Reason will get us nowhere, he teaches us, if we ignore the fundamental realities of human psychology. It's difficult, but one can influence people without being manipulative, and I think Obama does just that.

Obama's campaign has become a broad-based social movement because he knows how to wield hope skillfully and because people are sick of the fear that has disastrously guided this country's actions for (at least) the past seven years. He doesn't talk down to people as does President Bush, and is far more transparent about the motivations for his policy preferences. In short, he treats others equally as rational moral agents, regardless of how much they may disagree with him. Applying these strengths to the race issue, one in which fear of the Other plays all-too-dominant a role, is not only appropriate; it is of potentially tremendous benefit to this country's future.

Finally, Obama eschewed many of the pretenses and rhetorical flourishes of some of his earlier speeches and tried to connect to citizens on a personal level. Having come from mixed ethnic background, he was able to tell both blacks and whites, I think credibly, that he knows what we're going through. As he has often done, he was able to use specific examples of real people's lives powerfully, ending with a story of how Americans from very different worlds, a young white woman and an old black man, were able to come together over a common political purpose.

In some ways, this is the most important quality of this speech and the one that demands firsthand exposure. It made me think to my own experience. I of course have never been the victim of racism firsthand, but I happen to have a member of my immediate family for whom this is a very real possibility.

Several years ago, my parents decided to adopt a little girl from Guatemala. She's of mixed ethnicity but has the features and skin-tone to appear as an African American. She is also one of the most delightful people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. Even though she has been on this earth not much longer than a decade, she has been able to make astounding connections with other people of all walks of life--my parents joke that she has more adult friends than they do. Her affability and empathy, coupled with a flair for occasional theatrics (although that could just be a product of youth), make her unlike anyone else in my family (we tend to be bookish and on the shy side).

That she could be the victim of racial slurs and slights, of discrimination and prejudice, is a matter I prefer not to think about, because it deeply saddens and angers me. But I look to the example of Barack Obama and what he has been able to do both to transcend racial divisions personally and to inspire others to come together across this divide, and it literally brings tears to my eyes. It gives me hope at a point in my life when cynicism comes all too easily.

Perhaps Obama cannot deliver on his promises and will turn out to be a politician like any other. Perhaps. But I've seen what American politics looks like in the past quarter century and I know that I don't like it. I think he deserves a chance.

To be able to inspire people with his eloquence is more than just rhetoric; to effectively instill hope in others is to increase the likelihood that those hopes will be realized. When people are motivated to pursue a common good, they can do far more than they could isolated in the world of distraction that capitalism has created for us.

That's why his words matter and that's why he should be the next President of the United States.

UPDATE: This article in the NY Times on the impact of Obama's speech and the way it actually is opening up a conversation in America on race is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about (see also my response to another commenter below). Today, in fact, I myself had a very productive discussion with fellow grad students about this very topic.

Some people complain that he is all talk and no action, but they fail to understand how a skilled orator like Obama is acting in profound ways when he speaks. (Those familiar with "speech act" theory might consider extending its insights to an example like this.) That he is able to inspire people with his words, to motivate them to take further action--this is perhaps his greatest asset as a presidential candidate (and president, much of whose power is, as one of my friends pointed out, largely symbolic, directing the national conversation and so forth) and why I feel quite confident now in supporting him.

The Abolition of Intellectual Property

2008-03-14T23:00:00.000-07:00

Information should be free.

Music, movies, books, software, and other intellectual or artistic products should be a source of income only to the extent that something physical is being sold (e.g., a CD as opposed to its songs, a physical book as opposed to its chapters). The very notion of intellectual property is, in our digital age, no longer tenable; this turns out to be yet another aspect of life that shows there are limits to the capitalistic model that maintains that self-interest (profit) is the only feasible human motive.

I suspect that most of the people who read this blog are sympathetic to the idea, for instance, of free music. But even if you regularly use BitTorrent or some other P2P sharing, you probably have some reservations. You might think that what you're doing is stealing in some sense, or at least that there's something vaguely wrong about it (just not wrong enough to prevent you from doing it).

I would suggest that there is absolutely nothing wrong with it, that in fact trying to charge somebody money for an idea is the real theft. It seems the other way only because this absurd notion, "intellectual property", has been institutionally imposed on these older legitimate concepts: ideas, images, theories, words, artworks, songs, films, etc.

Let me back up these claims with arguments. First, consider the consequences of abolition. Imagine, tomorrow, that all copyright laws were to be purged from the books. Industry groups like the RIAA and MPAA would vanish in a puff of smoke and sulfur (along with a good many lawyers). Would this mean that artists, authors, entertainers, and so forth, would also cease to exist, no longer having the means to support themselves? By no means--here's why:

Let me use an analogy, by looking at a case where ideas still exist free of the notion that they are property. Scientists conduct experiments and publish the results but this data is freely available (especially as more academic journals are going online). This relatively free distribution (I'm skipping some of the details, but bear with me) is not only not a problem, it is of tremendous benefit to scientists everywhere. Indeed, this openness is a prerequisite of the success of the sciences; it is necessary for innovation and progress.

There's a system in place so that credit is given where it is due--i.e., by citing sources--but these citations do not function as a source of income. Imagine what it would be like if we had to pay a fee every time we cited someone else's research results or theories: it would destroy the institution of science as we know it.

How is it, then, that science is a sustainable practice if people aren't directly profiting from their ideas? Simple: they support themselves by other means. Most scientists are either academics--making a living by also being educators, teaching classes, supervising dissertations, and the like--or are private researchers working for companies that sell other goods and services that put these ideas to work.

The same can apply to the music industry and by extension to movies, television, and other areas. Musicians can make a living by selling the kinds of things that aren't information-based and can't be freely copied, say, by performing live shows for money and by selling CDs and T-shirts and other physical media just as they do now. If they are good and develop enough of a following, they can make a decent living.

As an example, I need only cite my two favorite bands, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, who are moving to a model like this--and quite successfully, I might add. Now, of course, not every musician has the popularity that these groups enjoy. It will be hard for new artists to emerge and establish a name for themselves, but this is already the case under the current regime. Unfortunately, not everyone has the talent to make a living off of music. (This of course doesn't mean that they can't still play music in their free time; they may just have to take up another vocation to support themselves.)

There'd be other advantages to eliminating copyright and similar laws. Consider remixes and the practice of sampling in genres like hip-hop. This has almost become impossible because of the idiocy of intellectual property--contrary to the corporate propaganda, trying to charge money for every sample, no matter how brief, has severely stifled creativity and innovation in music.

Art has a long history of artists "citing" famous images produced by other artists without paying some absurd fee to them. (I'm not an art historian, so I can't offer tons of concrete examples, but it's a long recognized practice in the art world. One example: Marcel DuChamp's famous rendition of Mona Lisa with a mustache.) As long as we give people credit and don't try to pass off their artistic or intellectual creations as our own, we are not doing anything morally objectionable.

See, I'm not entirely opposed to capitalism (I'm not for the abolition of all property as is, say, Marx), but we should reassess our assumption that people can own ideas, words, images, and the like. These belong properly to the public domain and constitute a common good--something which the rampant reign of capitalism has practically destroyed.

In the spirit of this alternative proposal, I must give credit to Wired's Chris Anderson, in particular, who wrote an article in this month's issue of the magazine outlining something very much like this. I've just expanded on his arguments and extended their scope. I will gladly recognize my indebtedness to his thinking, but don't expect me to send him a check!

---

Addendum: Some further support for this position just occurred to me. I'm going to try to articulate this dialogically by invoking an imaginary objector--I will do my best to prevent turning him into a straw man.

"What you say is all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that it's against the law, and is therefore wrong."

I grant that it is currently against the law. This is a question of fact, or at least of legal interpretation. My argument is that the law does not have a solid ethical justification here. Whether that merits breaking the law is a question I'll remain neutral about. If nothing else, my conclusion would warrant trying to change the law.

"But there is some justification to the law. If I write a poem or make a sculpture or compose a song, assuming I already legitimately possessed the tools and materials used, shouldn't I own that thing that I've made?"

To answer this I think requires looking at the institution of property more generally. Unless you are someone like Locke that thinks that property is somehow a natural right--a view I won't contest here, but one I doubt is commonly held today--you recognize that it is a social institution. It's a matter of convention, so there are no facts to determine whether an idea is "really" a piece of property or not aside from the social facts, i.e., the laws and implicit norms of a specific culture.

Now let's consider the kinds of justifications given for property laws. There are numerous practical advantages to be able to have exclusive control over certain physical objects. Since these are obvious I won't go into details or try to provide further justifications, but take this exclusive control as a recognized good. Now, it would be bad if someone took one of those objects from me without my permission, because I would no longer have that object under my control.

But what if, hypothetically, he could just make a facsimile of that object for his own use? I would keep my object and he would have one of his own to control as he saw fit. In fact, when I wasn't using my object, it would just be selfish of me not to make it available for that process of copying, although it would be nice if the guy gave me credit if someone asked him, "hey, where did you get that?" I think you can see how this hypothetical case is roughly how things stand with ideas, which can be shared without anyone losing anything.

"But what if, say, I put a lot of hard work into making that item while this other person skips all that and just takes the finished product for his own use? Isn't this unfair?"

I think you are getting at something here having to do with issues of relative status. I'm not hurt by losing the object, but if I'm in competition with this other individual I am now at a disadvantage, because he benefits from my work without having to put forth the effort himself (aside from the relatively easy act of the copying). So, to employ a useful distinction: in absolute terms, I am no worse off because I have lost nothing; in relative terms, however, I am worse off because someone else has gained something without paying the costs I paid to make that object.

"Precisely. The same thing applies to issues of prestige or fame. It would be wrong to profit from someone else's efforts like that. Isn't this a sufficient justification for intellectual property?"

I would say it's a justification but not a sufficient one, and one that happens to be overruled by the following considerations. The problem with status competitions and the like is that they are zero sum games. In order for someone to be rich or famous, most people have to be relatively poor or unpopular. Now, this is good to the extent that it can motivate people to produce things that everyone can benefit from; you do your work, I do mine, we trade, etc., etc., you have the foundations of a market economy.

But, there are plenty of non-zero sum games whose benefits for all of humanity can outweigh the benefits that are accrued by playing according to the rules of zero sum games only. Hence, with cooperation, you have a good which is greater than the sum of its parts.

(If this isn't obvious take the following example. Let's say we're both farmers in a relatively simple culture and we're trying to prepare our land to raise food, but there are a couple of large rocks that we each have on our property. Neither of us is strong enough to move the rocks alone, but if we join forces and take turns, first I help you move your rock then you help me move mine, we can move them. The same level of effort, roughly speaking, is able to be more effective because it's redistributed more sensibly.)

So, the question we need to ask is this: are the consequences from losing the motivation that relative status offers (i.e., the "profit motive") sufficient to eliminate the goods that we recognize and enjoy from having a wide assortment of intellectual and artistic creations at our disposal? In other words, it again comes to the issue of how we can encourage people to put serious effort into producing ideas and images, how we can foster a culture in which arts and sciences and other intellectual disciplines flourish.

But most good artists and writers and so forth do what they do because they enjoy it. The issue is not, "How can we motivate people to become artists?"--because the motivation is already there. The real question is rather, "How can we ensure that people can be artists and still be able to make a living?" And I've answered that above. They can sell things other than their ideas, such as live performances and physical objects that "put their ideas to work".

These artists are doing their part by creating goods that people enjoy, so they aren't mooching off of society, but if they lack sufficient talent (i.e., not enough people are interested in what they're producing), then they will just have to find other ways to support themselves. Them's the breaks.

"You have thoroughly convinced me. I was foolish not to see the larger picture. You truly are a great thinker and wise person and probably also an excellent dancer."

Thank you, imaginary interlocutor, you yourself have proven to be a formidable opponent (since you're my creation after all ;-) ).

---

To summarize: because ideas and information can be copied easily, they can be shared among individuals without causing any absolute losses. The relative losses, in terms of prestige and so forth, pale in comparison to the goods that are produced by free sharing because we are dealing with a non-zero sum game. The profit motive is able to operate in other ways and there is no serious danger of losing the goods of rich artistic/intellectual communities.

With respect to music, which all along has been the main example I have in mind, the only people who stand to lose are industry groups, lawyers, and perhaps the big record labels themselves. They invoke the artists for support (the really outspoken artists tend to be the ones who make a lot more money than they deserve, but society doesn't owe them the perpetuation of an extravagant lifestyle) only as a cover to promote their own interests. Humanity as a whole would be better off without these institutional monstrosities. They are no longer necessary and the people who constitute them should look for other lines of work. The RIAA is the real thief here, not music downloaders.

Why I want to move to Japan...

2008-03-02T16:31:00.000-08:00

Here.

At this point, I think it's pretty much inevitable that, some time after I finish my Ph.D., I will have to move there. Unlike the West, Japan gets it. Here's what I mean:

Besides financial and technological power, the robot wave is favored by the Japanese mind-set as well.

Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.

Robots are our friends and will only become our enemies if we make them that way (are you listening, proponents of robotic warfare?). I recently came across an interesting paper by Nick Bostrom on the ethics of what he calls "superintelligence" (i.e., smarter-than-human AI) that argues this point persuasively:

It seems that the best way to ensure that a superintelligence will have a beneficial impact on the world is to endow it with philanthropic values. Its top goal should be friendliness. How exactly friendliness should be understood and how it should be implemented, and how the amity should be apportioned between different people and nonhuman creatures is a matter that merits further consideration. I would argue that at least all humans, and probably many other sentient creatures on earth should get a significant share in the superintelligence’s beneficence. [...] One risk that must be guarded against is that those who develop the superintelligence would not make it generically philanthropic but would instead give it the more limited goal of serving only some small group, such as its own creators or those who commissioned it.

If a superintelligence starts out with a friendly top goal, however, then it can be relied on to stay friendly, or at least not to deliberately rid itself of its friendliness. This point is elementary. A “friend” who seeks to transform himself into somebody who wants to hurt you, is not your friend. A true friend, one who really cares about you, also seeks the continuation of his caring for you. Or to put it in a different way, if your top goal is X, and if you think that by changing yourself into someone who instead wants Y you would make it less likely that X will be achieved, then you will not rationally transform yourself into someone who wants Y. The set of options at each point in time is evaluated on the basis of their consequences for realization of the goals held at that time, and generally it will be irrational to deliberately change one’s own top goal, since that would make it less likely that the current goals will be attained.

If friendliness can be assured, then the benefits of superintelligence are profound. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that it could help us solve every human problem (or at least those which admit of a technical solution, which are probably most of them). Read the remainder of Bostrom's essay (it's short) if you're not convinced.

Since the Japanese will be the first to harvest the bounty of this robotic golden age, perhaps you can see why I'm so eager to join them.

A Milestone and a Proposal

2008-02-14T12:59:00.000-08:00

This is post #100! It's taken me long enough to get here, but it's still a bit surprising to see that my occasionally insightful rantings have hit the century mark. I've actually been thinking about this post for a while, and I wanted to do something distinctive. An idea came to me last night, so I will take this opportunity to flesh it out somewhat, albeit in the rough and sketchy way that characterizes most blog entries.

A Proposal for "Future Studies"

In the last couple of decades, multiculturalist sympathies have spawned a veritable smörgåsbord of interdisciplinary "Studies" departments, programs, and majors. From women and gender studies to east Asian studies to disability studies, these things have become ubiquitous. (One might also point to similar projects with less of an explicit political motivation, such as cognitive studies, consciousness studies, medieval studies, etc., etc.)

While I do not uncritically applaud all such developments, nevertheless I believe there's a value in interdisciplinary work in which a central theme is the organizing factor rather than a set of methodologies or a traditionally accepted body of texts. Toward that end, I wish to suggest a project to organize a vitally important body of research which has established itself on the internet, in a slew of popular books, and in a number of independent organizations but which has no real presence in academia.

I'm of course talking (as I often do) about the future. The researchers in this loose field, now variously called futurology or futurism, are often people with practical experience as programmers, inventors, engineers, roboticists, and various other technicians and technologists. Some academics are among them, even a few philosophers and historians, but by and large they tend to draw more from the sciences and applied fields than from the humanities.

Now here, I have in mind organizations like some of those to which I link in my sidebar (the WTA, IEET, and so forth). The problem with these think-tanks and other groups is that they tend to have an explicit political or practical agenda. I think this may not be appropriate for academia, which ought to have a mix of committed advocates and outright opponents with many in between.

Here's why this is so necessary. If there is any ability which elevates humanity above the rest of nature, it is our capacity for foresight. The ability to predict the future with at least some degree of success has long been deemed crucial to human societies, from the various prophets, oracles, soothsayers, and diviners of antiquity to the meteorologists, astronomers, economists, and technologists of today. While the world has become increasingly complex, nevertheless our ability to predict and control has only gotten better, even though it remains pitifully feeble. Really, all the various enterprises of contemporary science depend to some degree on mechanisms of prediction, albeit often local and short-term.

The ante is upped because of the extent of human power today. Our impact on the earth is unquestionably significant and rapidly growing. We now have the power not only to destroy civilization, but to take a significant chunk of the ecosphere with us. Less catastrophically, the effect of government policies on the lives of citizens can mean the difference between widespread satisfaction and destitute poverty.

But who is making decisions today on the basis of long-term effects? Markets seem unable to see beyond the profits of the upcoming fiscal quarter and modern democracies beyond the next election cycle. Meanwhile, it does not take a genius to see that this emphasis on making decisions based only on relatively immediate results is leading us toward disaster in the not-too-distant future, whether it be an economic crisis caused by the US's skyrocketing debts or an environmental crisis in the form of climate change. Greater foresight is of paramount importance for the well being and the very survival of our species.

While scientific prediction might seem the logical model to adopt for a broader study of tomorrow and the day after, I envision future studies also by another analogy: a counterpart and complement to the study of history. Now, of course, there is a central disanalogy to history in terms of the material being studied. History primarily works with texts and to a lesser extent with artifacts and other cultural traces. While always partial and imperfect, the historical record is far more concrete than what students of the future have to work with.

At the outset, I see three primary types of "materials" available for future studies. First, there is that same material of the historians. Not only can we learn from the past to try to avoid its mistakes, we can also take lessons from previous efforts at predicting the future. So, for instance, a variety of scientific practices tend to have far better track records than the oracular and prophetic traditions of the world.

Second are the conclusions of the social sciences. This virtually follows from my previous observation about the predictive successes of the sciences. The future with which we are concerned is of human beings and what they create, so a good understanding of human nature (both individual and social) and its cultural variations is a vital asset.

Third, and not entirely separate from the previous two, is the study of trends. Perhaps the most famous example that futurists tend to provide is Moore's Law (roughly, that the number of transistors which can be fit onto a computer chip of constant size doubles every 1 - 2 years). This has been shown by Ray Kurzweil (whose more far-fetched predictions need to be taken with a grain of salt, if not a salt mine) to apply to other aspects of computing (memory size, processor speed, cost of computing, etc.) but also more generally to new technologies.

For instance, Kurzweil uses the example of US railroads in the nineteenth century. The number of miles of track roughly doubled every few years, until it hit a saturation point, where it began to slow its growth and reach a plateau. While supportive of the general point about technology's tendency to grow exponentially, it also demonstrates that trends do not last forever. So while Moore's Law has been going strong for over half a century, and is expected to continue for at least a couple more decades, it will eventually reach a point where physical constraints prevent further growth.

Thus, the study of trends needs significant supplement by other efforts to get a sense of how long they can continue. Their relative simplicity and statistical/mathematical character is a great draw for researchers, and thus far too much importance has been placed on them (for reasons not unlike why the study of external behavior dominated psychology for decades: it's just easier to work with). We need also to look at social movements and other forces which are not so easily modeled mathematically.

With that caveat though, I think it is important to recognize that mathematics is probably the most powerful tool that we have here. I envision a lot of the sounder predictions as ones generated by complex computer analyses which can weigh more data than can any team of researchers. This is the norm in meteorology, oceanography, climatology, and other sciences of the environment and I don't see why it would be any different for a broader study of what is to come.

Nevertheless, insofar as it is interdisciplinary, there is a place for academics in the humanities (like myself of course), a need for discourse on appropriate methodologies and for critiques of the limitations of mathematical modeling.

Now I don't anticipate that my proposal is entirely novel--I imagine I could find similar ones if I did a bit of research (googling "future studies" just now, I even see a handful of programs at places like the Universities of Hawaii and of Houston). And it's good that I'm not the only one with this idea, especially since no one listens to me. But, in any case, I think it is well past time for the study of the future to become respectable, rigorous, and visible in the academic world.

The future comes whether we want it or not, so we'd best make ourselves ready and direct it to our advantage so far as we are capable. Excelsior!

UPDATE: Perhaps I should have done this prior to writing this post--I was so excited about what seemed to me a novel idea--but I did decide to read up a little on the subject. As it turns out, futures studies (which sounds too awkward to me) had more of a place in academia in the 60s and 70s but now only Houston and Hawaii remain as distinct programs. This is from the University of Houston's account of the history of the field:

The current state of futures studies is more extensive yet more muted than during the Golden Age of the 1960s and early 70s. The world today is more ready to consider the future explicitly than it was then. The future is not left to a small band of marginal writers and teachers. Business people, government officials, and educators are all waking up to the fact we better focus on the future if we want to be successful there. They are making strategic plans powered by visions and informed by scenarios.

At the same time, formal programs of education and training in futures have shrunk rather than expanded. New concentrations like competitive intelligence and strategic management have adopted many of the tools of the futures field without necessarily adopting its theoretical or ideological positions. In the end, futures may end like many of the social sciences. Having sparked the society's interest in a subject of immense importance (e.g., human and social relations) and having developed many tools to deal with that subject, the social sciences today are almost purely academic while the applications are being pursued in business and government agencies without their continued involvement.

I think this project is now more important than ever, and I wonder if the shrinking of the field since its heyday is the result of a backlash against optimistic predictions which never came true. In any case, I hope this is one trend which can be reversed. A more even-handed approach (neither utopian nor apocalyptic) should have a place in academia and not left to government and the private sector (institutions of which I am far warier).

The Future of Medicine

2008-01-13T11:43:00.000-08:00

In his New Organon, Francis Bacon writes: "...it is utterly obvious that in any major work that the human hand undertakes, the strength of individuals cannot be increased nor the forces of all united without the aid of tools and machines."

I'm reading Bacon for my now-ongoing qualifying exams, and he is simply delightful. Many say his optimism is unwarranted but I think the historical record of scientific and technological accomplishments shows he largely had the right idea. If he did not anticipate the problems that would arise in a technological society with science established as a powerful institution, he nevertheless foresaw the power of the systematic, controlled observation of nature.

One case in point is found here in an article aptly titled "Biotechnology Builds a New Heart". As many of you know, I follow a lot of tech news so I read stuff like this all the time. However, I've paid special attention to a few areas, particularly in medicine.

The growth or regeneration of human organs (without the use of clones as walking organ banks as stupidly portrayed in popular films and books) is one such example. This development with the heart (in this case, it's a pig heart) is nothing new; individuals have actually been walking around with artificially generated bladders for several years now (see, e.g., here). We are already in the age of artificial organs, perhaps within a decade of growing any part of the body on demand.

(This includes nervous tissue; recent advances in neuromedicine such as this, not to mention the research involving neuron-computer interfacing, indicate that my prediction that paralysis will be cured within a decade is by no means far-fetched. The one exception, of course, would be growing a whole brain, although parts of one could probably be replaced. And who knows what may yet happen?)

Perhaps it's not all roses and lollipops, but I'd much rather live now than in the primitive times of Bacon (or Aquinas or Aristotle, etc.). Wouldn't you?

The Ethics of the Interesting

2008-01-08T07:36:00.000-08:00

There's a claim I've found myself making often recently, but have not sufficiently examined nor attempted to justify. It is this: "The 'interesting' is the most important normative category." To most, this will seem to be an utterly bizarre statement, whereas others might wonder about the role "importance" plays in a statement like this.

(To be consistent, ought I not to say that the "interesting" is the most interesting normative category? Of course I don't say this because it is circular and sounds silly. Another way of saying what I mean to say might be that I rank the interesting as first and foremost among value categories.)

What I mean by this claim is not apparent in any "literal" interpretation of the sentence. Part of the problem is that "interesting" is perhaps the most boring word in the English language. The way it is said conveys far more information than the use of the term itself. I mean, what do you say when someone makes totally outrageous claims that make them seem like a nut, or when you're forced to endure a painfully boring account of the mundane details of their utterly trivial existence? "That's interesting." Yet, it may just be the vagueness of the term itself that for me is a source of its value.

So far I have probably made little sense, so I will try to explain in the only way I know how. A question that underlies my statement here is this: "What are the preconditions for value of any kind?" Let's assume for a moment, as some physicists suppose, that there are many, perhaps infinitely many, different universes existing in parallel. Some of these may be close to our own, but I imagine the vast majority of them take simple forms such as fire (high energy, highly unstable, devoid of anything resembling stars, planets, atoms, and other such things) or ice (virtually static, no energy, highly entropic).

In these universes, I contend, there is nothing of value. There's no sense in saying things should be one way rather than another because there's nobody to make such claims. Perhaps we can make claims about them from the outside, but within them the normative simply does not apply.

What makes our universe capable of supporting us, of supporting life, stars, molecules and atoms, quarks and neutrinos, etc., is that it is neither purely Heraclitean nor simply Parmenidean. To continue the Presocratic allusion, our universe is Empedoclean, locked in a battle between forces, with relatively stable and regular but also mutable components. To use a mathematical analogy, it is like a fractal, an intricately complex thing that is generated by something relatively simple (say the basic laws and constants of our particular universe, or the intricate arrangement in space/time of otherwise indistinguishable particles).

And, were it not so, it would be valueless. (Yes, I am presupposing that to be of value, something must be of value to someone, but even many unimaginative absolutists suppose that God is the someone who ultimately sets values.) Quite simply, most universes are probably utterly boring and utterly valueless. Or, they're not even boring (except maybe to us), because they lack anything like a point of view within them. They might as well not exist.

But our case is different. There is value, or at least apparent value (to me, there is no difference between these two). There are components of the universe like you and I for which some things are better than others. We have interests. And here, I would include things like animals that feel pleasure and pain, although there may be other possibilities we have never encountered (perhaps future computers will have interests?).

(Incidentally, I am primarily indebted to William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Richard Dawkins for formulating the problem in this light.)

In short: There is no good or bad, no beautiful or ugly, no pleasant or painful, no true or false (!), unless there is first something interesting. (This is why the idea of a God that is absolutely simple yet also a person is utter nonsense.)

Now, this view has consequences. On the one hand, it rejects the central premise of utilitarianism (that pleasure and the lack of pain are the sole source of values). If this were the case, then logically we should go about turning the universe into something like a continuous, gigantic orgasm. However, such a universe (in which there was only pleasure, if such a thing is even possible) would be a boring universe--there would be no way to discern between the actual and the ideal, because really, there would be no difference. More than the annoying truism that "there is no pleasure without pain", this is a statement about the necessity of points of view that are only parts of the whole for the generation of value.

Now, the real question behind the first question about the source of value is the simple one of why is (my) life worth living? Other than the instinct to survive, or the force of habit, or the irrational fear of nonexistence, what is it that makes my life worthwhile? I think this is a question that can only be answered from an individual point of view.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to this question. I do not know what kind of world I would like to see emerge nor even what kind of person I should be. I'm no existentialist (although this particular post may be misleading on that front), but this just seems to be one of those things that is purely arbitrary.

As it stands, since I am wary of making unreasonable commitments (even though an ultimate commitment, as Kierkegaard shows, could never be reasonable [since reasonableness presupposes something else, a reason, that is appealed to as justification, which would make it not an ultimate commitment]), I feel as though I am just "slid[ing] along the surface of things" (to quote Bret Easton Ellis).

In practice, of course, I constantly make arbitrary value judgments based on my affective habits. I'm not convinced that one needs to have anything like an ultimate ground for value, or one final, overarching commitment. Yet, I find myself still desirous of something like that.

So, for the time being, I go with the interesting, because I believe that is important for the reasons(?) I've tried to put forth here. But that's not enough because there are many varieties of interesting things, some of which produce a lot of suffering for those involved. As I have set things up, I don't see that there is a resolution to this dilemma, and it still leaves me with the very real question of what to make of myself and of the world around me.

Perhaps you don't find all this interesting, but I do.

Links

2007-11-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

This series of articles on Slate, written by William Saletan, and a response here, might be of interest to some people, centering on an issue that recently came up in the news. Personally, I cannot endorse what Saletan says, and I hope by all accounts that he is mistaken.

Fun with Technology

2007-11-09T13:08:00.001-08:00

One of these days (today?), I'm going to redesign my sidebar to match up more with my new trajectory. But for now, here are a couple of interesting pieces of technology news.

First, is an opinion piece from PC Magazine rightfully complaining about the primitive attitude that American consumers have about robots. We're too obsessed with robot uprisings and worries about sex robots to take home robotics seriously, the author rightly complains. This is why Japan and other parts of SE Asia are years ahead of the curve here--and further fuel for the inevitable 21st century ascendancy of East over West. (Also, largely why I'd like to move to Tokyo one of these days.)

Second should be something even idiotic American Luddites could appreciate: growing organs from scratch! We're not quite there yet, but according to this article, we may only be a decade or so away, because nature already does so much of the work for us. It's extremely promising, showing how (again, stupidly misguided) American fears about raising clones to harvest organs are totally misplaced. I wonder what Biblical verses the fundamentalists will be wrangling up to oppose this particular advance...

Informal Review of John Harris's Enhancing Evolution

2007-10-22T03:47:00.000-07:00

This evening/morning I finished one of the latest books on human enhancement (HE) by renowned bioethicist John Harris. Enhancing Evolution aspires not simply to argue for the permissibility of HE, but also to defend a moral obligation to use such technology, particularly with respect to procreation, and to help foster research which could lead to it.

I'll be frank. Harris is not a particularly gifted author--if enhancements to writing ability emerge, he would be wise to use them. His sentences can be long and digressive, and his organization of arguments is a bit jumbled. He also has an annoying tendency to rely on citations of his past publications in lieu of developing more elaborate arguments.

Despite these shortcomings, there is much of value in the book. He does a nice job of showing that the arguments against enhancement are largely based on prejudices and intuitions that result from fear and limited imagination. His treatment of Leon Kass--if I had to choose an archenemy, Kass would certainly be the odds-on favorite, so great is my hatred for him--is pointed and downright hilarious.

His main argument--although not explicitly suggested as such--is perhaps decisive on the issue. It's essentially the same argument for a woman's right to choose abortion, or an individual's right to take psychotropic drugs in the privacy of his own home. It begins with what Harris calls "the democratic presumption":

One of the presumptions of liberal democracies is that the freedom of citizens should not be interfered with unless good and sufficient justification can be produced for so doing. The presumption is that citizens should be free to make their own choices in the light of their own values, whether or not these choices and values are acceptable to the majority. Only serious real and present danger either to other citizens or to society is sufficient to rebut this presumption. If anything less than this high standard is accepted, liberty is dead. [72]

As Harris notes, this is essentially the principle that Mill defends in On Liberty. It puts the burden on those who would restrict research into or employment of enhancement technologies. The issue is not, are enhancements morally right, but rather, is there a good enough reason to forbid those who judge them to be desirable from developing or using them?

This emphasis on individual choice (and parental choice in the case of germline genetic engineering and other reproductive technologies) is what distinguishes contemporary proponents of genetic enhancement from the much maligned eugenicists of the previous century. Equating the two is nothing but guilt by association.

What was problematic in eugenics is not the motive to better humanity--indeed, any society which enforces compulsory education has such a motive--but the totalitarian imposition on individuals that would compel them to undergo selective breeding or participation in dangerous experiments. Indeed, if anyone is close to the totalitarian spirit here, it is those who would restrict me from using the enhancements I desire to use on myself or my offspring.

I love this argument often employed by HE proponents (especially its nifty reversal of totalitarian roles--who's the Nazi now, Luddite?)! With the exception of certain conservatives, virtually everyone subscribes to this democratic presumption. The problem is that they are inconsistent in its application, especially when it comes to technology and HE.

On top of this central argument, Harris does an admirable job of showing how a right to individual self-determination as suggested here can be extended to include choices over offspring. The primary reasons given for denying such reproductive interventions, when teased out, amount to mere fears and prejudices.

For instance, the harm that might be caused to a child who grew up knowing they were designed is seen as compelling enough to restrict liberty. Potential psychological harm (of which there is no evidence; children of in vitro fertilization certainly seem to adept well enough despite the "artificial" process which generated them), especially when we're talking about children who are hopefully designed to be more resilient to such things, is by no means decisive.

Moreover, his consideration of the moral status of embryos is perhaps the best discussion I've seen of the subject (although admittedly I am not well versed on the extensive literature here). The most ingenious point is his discussion of embryonic splitting and recombination. An embryo of four cells can be split into four separate single cells, each of which can develop into a fetus (indeed, identical twins are the result of this kind of process). However, they can also be brought back together into a single embryo that will develop as normal.

So what has happened if we split an embryo into four and then recombine them (a process in which no matter is created or destroyed, but only rearranged in space)? Have we spawned four lives from one, and then killed off three of them (in which case we might also ask, which of the four would survive)? Applying the doctrine of ensoulment at fertilization only makes things more absurd; can souls split and recombine too? (Incidentally, even if it is the most popular view, ensoulment is a vulgar prejudice that I don't take too seriously; the kind of people who advocate it are not likely to be the kind that respond to reason.)

This example is also useful in addressing those who try to argue for value in potentiality. If each embryo can actually develop into many different individuals, do we have an obligation to split every embryo as much as possible in order to realize their full potential? Similarly, with the right technology, virtually any cell in the body could become a distinct individual (all that is necessary for this is the genome that every cell contains).

Embryos are just (collections of) cells. They have no intrinsic worth or value. Deal with it.

Lastly, I like his treatment of the issue of disability in relation to enhancement. He uses a simple distinction to show how the rights of the disabled have no moral force for preventing HE. Just because we value a certain trait in ourselves or our offspring by no means entails that we disvalue individuals who lack this trait.

For instance, if I were to lose my hearing, I would strongly desire to restore it through whatever technological means necessary. This reasonable desire is totally consistent with regarding the deaf as individuals who deserve the same legal and ethical status as anyone else. The same applies to distinctions between the enhanced and non-enhanced; a kind of egalitarianism can be maintained here, should one desire to do so.

In the end, I give Enhancing Evolution a half-hearted recommendation. Some of its arguments and discussions are excellent, but others are the usual fare of HE proponents, and all the while one has to deal with Harris's sometimes garbled prose. However, I would strongly recommend reading chapter 8 for his vicious and entertaining take-down of Kass (and Habermas, to boot!).

Something unexpected...

2007-10-19T16:13:00.000-07:00

Last night, I inadvertendly induced in myself what might best be described as a mystical experience. I won't say how I did so, but I must say that it was very educational. I've had experiences somewhat similar, but nothing quite this intense.

This is a subject I actually wrote my undergraduate thesis on, looking at James' Varieties of Religious Experience and at later research in what is sometimes called "neurotheology". As can be expected, the firsthand account cannot be captured in words, but I can see that the terms often used make some limited sense of it.

There's a sort of feeling of oneness, a sense of unique insight into the world and a profound feeling of certainty, and a kind of sublime awareness so intense that it led me alternatively to cry, laugh, and then do both at the same time--at least, I was unable to tell at one point which it was.

I felt like I finally understood what the Greeks tried to capture in their tragedies; I experienced a confirmation of the Heraclitean hypothesis "panta rhei" (everything flows; all is in flux; there is no being only becoming); and I realized that the solitude I have recently been trying to celebrate comes at a heavy price, that is, I saw with clarity how necessary it is that I connect to others and end this partially self-imposed loneliness. This last insight has provided a much needed remedy to the cynicism which has been dominating my thoughts of late.

What is remarkable about these experiences is how open they are to interpretation. At no point did I ever get the sense of a divine presence--which is one thing that people often talk about but which still remains foreign to me. Indeed, the experience was intensely solipsistic in a certain respect. I even felt that reflecting upon my prior knowledge of the causes of such experiences actually enhanced it in a unique way.

I, of course, recognized that the scientific account is no more adequate than the self-reports of mystics. I even saw more clearly than before how both traditional religion and scientific dogmatism are on the same self-defeating page here, denying that which is directly in front of them for the sake of something not immediately experienced.

I think Sam Harris, who I wrote about relatively recently, is dead on about the importance of such kinds of experience and the practices that surround them. The atheist who denies this aspect of life is throwing the baby out with the bath water. In fact, I saw with such clarity how such experiences are nothing but a natural side effect of all the various modules that make up that "experience machine" that is constituted by various parts of our brain.

If you think about all of the aspects of experience that we take for granted--the feeling of our bodies in space (proprioception), the distinction between our self and the rest of the world, the differentiation of the world into individual objects that persist over time, the capacity for intense emotional responses, etc.--you can see how messing with this subtle chemistry by meditation (or other more direct means) can produce amazing results that, to the uninitiated, could suggest contact with some supernatural force.

As for me, I had a very "naturalistic" kind of mystical experience. I still believe the universe to be utterly indifferent (and almost entirely outside of our grasp), but I see how value, worth, meaning is real despite the fact that it can only be created by tiny parts of the world that, like cosmic mirrors, reflect the universe back on itself. We may just be ephemeral modes of being, but we do constitute something qualitatively different.

If there is such a thing as the "divine", it's a distinctly human divinity (or, to be open to the possibility of other kinds of beings capable of the same, a finite divinity). If there is anything like immortality, it is the immortality of the singular moment, the kind of eternity that I think Wittgenstein recognized which made him see it as irrational to fear death.

I am still grappling with the recognition that everyone who undergoes these experiences emerges from them with a feeling of profound certainty about whatever knowledge they gained from them (such so that I am skeptical about any such knowledge claims), on the one hand, and the possibility that the reason they are so sure is that they actually did see some truth, on the other. (As Spinoza suggests, truly adequate knowledge is incapable of being doubted.) I also don't know whether I wish to try to induce further such experiences in the future. But, at least I'm feeling pretty good today, in the wake of all of this.

There are other things, more personal things, that I won't say here. I'm still not exactly sure what to "do" with these memories now. I at least wanted to have some written record so that when the less intense aspects fade further, I might be able to recall them some other time. And, I must admit, I find some value in sharing this experience with others (pretending for a moment that people actually read my exhibitionistic logorrhea).

Now what?

2007-10-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

So I gave my paper on "robocracy" last night. I think it went quite well. I got some great questions from my peers, who actually took it seriously, and in light of their criticisms, I think I'm going to abandon the idea.

(The basic premise: Plato's Republic w/ superintelligent machines serving as the guardians, i.e., rule by [hopefully benevolent] AI experts.)

I think I'm going to try to take a more "descriptive" approach to these issues. It's difficult enough to lay out what the future is going to look like. I want to wait and see what forms artificial life and intelligence takes in the future before I advocate making them part of the political structure.

Generally speaking, I think I'm going to put some of this AI stuff on the back burner, and focus more on the issue of human enhancement. I am more or less convinced now that ordinary, unmodified humans will go extinct this century. But human extinction is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we are replaced by something better.

For a nice intro to the subject, I highly recommend this lecture by Michael Bess. He lays out some of the expectations and a lot of the relevant moral concerns. Even if you have no background at all on human enhancement, it should make sense (it was written for a popular [educated] audience).

If there is one thing I lament about losing confidence in the AI-ocracy schema, it's that now I come very close to being perceivable as a "prophet of doom". I frankly don't see anyway humanity can be saved. Our creations are already out of our control, so how could we possibly hope to prevent weakly godlike intelligences from destroying our species? Our best bet is probably to enhance ourselves, but that may result in a different kind of loss of humanity.

And I'm just not sure whether that's good or bad. So much of what humanity takes itself to be is simply the product of ignorance, chance, and wishful thinking. It's mere pretense, flight-of-fancy, romantic sentimentalism. I'm not even sure what I value about our species, except perhaps the ability to recognize this (that our reason has some power over our affects) and our creativity and innovation.

But, these things are the province of a slim minority. On this logic, it makes no sense for me to be anything other than an elitist. I'm content to put the rest of humanity on a par with the bulk of mammalian life. That's not to say they don't warrant moral concern--we should not be cruel to animals--but they certainly don't deserve any reverence or respect. I suppose I shan't miss them when they're gone.

The End of "Atheism"?

2007-10-06T16:43:00.000-07:00

This is a fascinating piece from the recent conference of the Atheist Alliance in D.C. by Sam Harris who--along with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett--is regarded as one of the "four horsemen" of the new atheism. However, in this speech he argues, I think cogently, that we should abandon atheism both as a term and as a structured viewpoint.

(He makes analogies with "non-racists" and "non-astrologers" and points out how claiming to be an atheist lumps one in with nasty people like Stalin, at least in the minds of the religious.)

The speech apparently caused quite a stir, with one woman even vowing to throw away Harris' books in the Q&A session, but it reflects well on his author that he chose to be frank with an audience that was hoping for something quite different. I particularly like what he says about meditation and other such practices, in defiance of atheistic conventional wisdom.

My days of being a militant, anti-religious atheist are in the past, but I have tended to still use the term, even writing about it in a recent post. I think that I may continue to use it when forced to select among options for "religion" on various websites (it's the shortest answer for me to that question), but I have no reason to go around advertising myself as one.

On Facebook, where they allow you to type in a response to the religion question, I've called myself an "unbeliever", a description which is both apt and less problematic. I am also fond of the terms "materialist" and "naturalist"--although I also like to call myself an "unnaturalist", but with a different sense of the term "nature".

(If, by "nature", we understand the universe [or if you prefer, multiverse] and everything in it, I am a naturalist [as opposed to a supernaturalist], but if we instead mean that which is opposed to civilization, artificiality, and technology, I am an unnaturalist. Incidentally, if by "god", we understand the totality of all being, I am not an a-theist, because that "god" exists by definition. In short, a lot of this stuff is just a question of the meanings of words, but since these are always manifold, labels can be misleading.)

Untimely Reflections

2007-10-02T03:46:00.000-07:00

Every time I read Nietzsche, I get the sense that all of 20th Century philosophy (the interesting stuff, not all-too-clever "analytic" claptrap) is, to twist Whitehead's phrase, a footnote to Nietzsche. It has become impossible for me not to be inspired as I pore over his words, especially his last few books.

Many of the social maladies that he was the first to diagnose have only continued and worsened. We live in such a thoroughly mediocratized age that even the elite are afraid to be elitists. People of superior intelligence and creativity are made to feel guilty for their talents. (And while it can hardly be said that we "deserve" such things, since they are parceled out by chance as it were, we should certainly not feel bad for possessing them.)

I think Nietzsche is wrong to the extent that he ties some of his valuations to gender and race (of course, this may be a bad interpretation of his use of "types"). Indeed, it is an advancement that our age strives to look past superficialities like sex and skin color. However, we have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Evaluating individuals on account of group identity is a mistake; evaluating individuals per se is not.

The mediocratic spirit is virtually uncontested in America today. The one area in which we allow the flowering of productive conflicts and the ascendancy of the victors--the business world--is corrupted by its extreme short-sightedness (profitability in the upcoming fiscal quarter as guiding ideal). The race to the bottom that is called "politics" in America today disgusts me, to be sure, but when we go behind the scenes--looking at those who control money, media, power, the fabrication of reality--the stupidity of the corporate world just becomes more nauseating.

The temptation when reading Nietzsche is to want to cast oneself as a master, as a free spirit, a true philosopher. But most of us don't have the stomach for it; we are too much the product of our anti-elitist culture. So, let me be frank. It is impossible to have democratic or socialistic sympathies and to be Nietzschean. This may not be a problem, of course (who wants to be merely derivative of some previous thinker?), but let's at least not lie about it.

Perhaps it's the years of living alone, a lifelong paucity of friendships and other close relationships, the tendency to drift apart from my peers when I do discover them--in short, my solitude--that has allowed me to read Nietzsche differently than when I was a naive undergraduate. I complain of loneliness, sure, but I need solitude, time to reflect, to talk to myself, to take a break from the hell of other people (and exchange it for the purgatory of my own mind). I've had more than my fill of it lately, to be sure, but I should not be ungrateful for the effects it has had on my development. Still, it makes it even harder to resist that temptation...

As I begin to embrace my more meritocratic, even aristocratic, sentiments, I find that I have a lot of assumptions to rethink. The unidimensional range of acceptable political opinions--not simply in political theater, but in academia in particular--is especially constraining. The issues I care about don't fit anywhere on a left-right axis.

If I had to summarize my ideals, I would say that I want to see the improvement of humanity--but what does this mean now?

Contrary to prevailing tendencies, I think we should, as far as possible, make nature--and especially human nature--submit to our will. This, I think, can be the ultimate triumph of humanity: the recasting of the world in our image. But not "our" in the sense of just anyone. Those individuals who are truly exceptional--and I think these will eventually be, for the most part, those we call "posthuman"--should be the ones to do this. If we must have democracy to keep the masses in line, then let us also have a Solon, let us have lawgivers who can craft the appearance of popular sovereignty. And among those lawgivers let there be real equality.

And now we come to the real difficulty in espousing such opinions. My intense desire for honesty, and not simply directed toward myself, leads me to make public what might better be kept private. But I am not ashamed of my radical ideas (and for the time being they remain relatively unthreatening, drowned out in a sea of other voices) and sometimes I want to invite trouble, to make life a little more interesting. In any case, I change my mind often enough that I have no problem distancing myself from previous assertions if necessary. Old opinions get boring after a while anyway.

Nevertheless, I should tame my vanity and recall Descartes' parting maxim: Bene qui latuit, bene vixit (or, better yet, Spinoza's Caute!). Perhaps reinvigorating an old custom and writing in Latin would be worthwhile (because not writing is simply not an option). That would just leave me with the task of learning it... (Damn these American public schools!)

Depression and Human Enhancement (HE)

2007-09-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

Here's something really neat but possibly scary to the uninitiated. The article, "Happiness is a Warm Electrode" in Popular Science details a new treatment for depression that involves, as you might expect, implanting electrodes in certain parts of the brain.

Called "Deep Brain Stimulation" (DBS), it does exactly that, and has been effective for about 2/3 of the couple dozen who have undergone it, and apparently a larger trial involving 100 patients is in the works. Most notably, the patients who are undergoing the surgery are ones who have not responded well to drugs or even ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). (Incidentally, DBS was first used on patients with Parkinson's disease, and has proven to be an effective treatment there.)

Of course, the usual suspects are comparing this to the lobotomy and other sense nonsense. I think such an assessment evinces a crass misunderstanding of what depression is and what treatment of it entails. An effective therapeutic intervention for depression should produce what Spinoza calls "joy" (laetitia), that is, not merely happiness but an increase in an individual's power to act.

And in the case study examined in the article, DBS does precisely that. A woman who could not even muster the energy to get off of her sofa and clean her house has her life turned around by the procedure. She finds herself able to communicate more effectively with friends, family, and even strangers and is able to get out and exercise more. The transformation is rather extraordinary.

When I think of human enhancement, this is precisely the sort of thing I have in mind. This woman has changed who she is, but what she was before was essentially a defective human being. People are afraid to make value judgments like that, and they try to skirt around the issue, but it's the truth. This is a good that technology can allow: HE as an enhancement of our humanness.

Of course, it can move us above the human level as well (and this is what is typically distinguished as "enhancement" in contrast to "treatment", although I obviously question such a distinction). But isn't becoming something greater than what one is "naturally" a distinctive part of what it means to be human? To me, that's the part that matters, not the biological substrate.

I'm beginning to get a clearer sense of what I want to write my dissertation on. I want to challenge the simplistic, sometimes positivistic value judgments that proponents--and in a different way, opponents--of HE implicitly or explicitly make. However, instead of merely criticizing the notion of HE, I want to put forth an alternative formulation that draws on ethical thinkers like Aristotle, Spinoza, and Nietzsche (my philosophical triumvirate, as it so happens).

In other words, I want to develop a richer conception of what it would mean to improve humanity through the use of technology, one that is responsive to the criticisms coming from, for instance, Adorno and Horkheimer, certain strains of feminism and environmentalism, and so forth.

(The criticisms coming from the religious are of little philosophical interest to me; they are based on a fundamental disagreement not simply in premises but, as Wittgenstein reminds us, in ways of life. In other words, there's no point in arguing against them. Religion will have to be defeated by other means. [I'm thinking robots. :-) ])

I have many details to work out, but I think this project is quite workable and certainly worthwhile from my standpoint. It's unpopular and perhaps even offensive to many academics in the humanities, but as far as I'm concerned that's a plus. (Haven't all great ideas been initially regarded as distasteful, foolish, crazy, and downright dangerous?)

Assorted Musings, Political, Technological, and Otherwise

2007-09-21T22:38:00.001-07:00

After many months of actually working hard, I've finished all of the papers that I was working on, and now have additional free time on my hands to do, among other things, some blogging. Have written something like 150 pages just over the course of the summer, I'm more confident about finishing this program on time so that I can move on to better things, such as locations outside of the South.

I wrote on a variety of subjects, many of which went to the heart of my interests, and sustained reflection and research on these matters has led me to question old opinions and values. But there have also been some unanticipated side effects.

For instance, having abstained from reading political blogs for the past several months in an effort to use my time more productively, I think I've discovered that I enjoy not being engaged in politics. If nothing else, I'm less angry than I used to be. I've been reading snippets in the news here and there, but blogs have been excluded almost entirely.

Instead, I find myself reading more about technology. I recently purchased a subscription to Wired, a magazine run by techno-libertarians, but nonetheless one which addresses issues I believe important. The nice thing about technology news is that--with the notable exception of apocalyptic forecasts and so forth--it's on the whole positive.

The kinds of discoveries and inventions emerging in science and engineering are often astounding, and it's one area in which something like progress can be identified. (Speaking on the descriptive level here; the repercussions of new advances reside in far murkier waters.)

(For instance, I read in Wired just today that researchers at Wake Forest have successfully grown human bladders as replacement organs by extracting muscle and other tissue cells from, I assume, individuals in need of a transplant. This is a huge breakthrough that could totally revolutionize medicine if it could be extended to regenerate other organs and body parts.

The very same technology should, in principle, allow us to "grow meat" by cultivating muscle tissue from various animals. Thus, not only could we replace the horrific practice of factory farming with something probably more cost effective [at least, in the long run] and cruelty-free, but we could also have more control over things like fat content, I imagine, to make for healthier meat. Perhaps people will be uneasy about eating meat grown "in a vat" or whatever, but eventually we'll get used to it.)

But, really, my politics have changed, and I find myself now concerned with emerging issues that transcend our current simplistic political divide. I still detest the Republicans, if for nothing else than their anti-science ideological tendencies, but I identify less with the American left now. It's not as though I've ever strongly identified as a Democrat (I've registered to vote either as independent or as Green), but I am now more wary of the Ludditism all too often found in the left (especially among academics in the humanities; just because they can't do math they have to take it out on the whole scientific enterprise!).

While I still have a lot of interest in human enhancement, I've been reading up more on artificial intelligence. I feel more confident about a few predictions for the future (leaving aside the timescale issue). The 21st Century will, more likely than not, result in the end of human civilization as we know it. Either we will enter a new dark ages, make ourselves extinct (and take quite a few other species with us), or in the worst case eradicate virtually all life on earth (I suspect some strains of bacteria will survive). There is a slim chance, though, that we will be able to control our technology well enough so that it makes life for us a paradise.

It all hinges on the development of hyperhuman intelligence (to use the terminology of researcher J. Storrs Hall, whose excellent Beyond AI has been my pleasure reading of recent). Autogenous, that is, self-developing, AI could quickly grow many times more intelligent--or at least more powerful--than any human government. They might seize control of world affairs, but this is not necessarily a bad thing, because they could try to organize the world to make life better for us, and they might be able to stop the existential threats posed by rogue bio- and nanotechnology.

Our best bet is to develop strong safeguards, a kind of conscience for our machines, that would prevent them from viewing us as a threat. If done right (a big "if", mind you), I think it could result in almost godlike beings that would have possess wisdom orders of magnitude greater than could be found in any human being. (I've been working on an argument re-casting AI as the Platonic philosopher-kings of a Cyber-Republic.)

My thinking is that to be a capital-D Democrat, it is probably necessary to at least be a small-d democrat, and it is questionable whether I fall into the latter camp anymore. In a world growing in complexity at an exponential rate, why should a mob of bigoted, mouth-breathing yokels have any say at all in how affairs are conducted, and why should I entrust non-expert politicians who neither stand for nor understand anything of significance to make national decisions?

I should be clear. I am still interested in many of the values I espoused when I more readily affiliated with the left. I would like to see effective freedoms (within reasonable limits), basic provisions (guaranteed life necessities, medical coverage, access to advanced technology [free wireless internet for all!]), and justice (that is, everyone getting what is appropriate for them) for everyone. I just don't think popular sovereignty is an effective way of bringing this about. The prejudices of the vulgar are just too strong--and when it comes down to it, we are all vulgar.

I think I agree with Winston Churchill's apocryphal description of democracy as the worst form of government except for all of the other ones. Indeed, it is a lesser evil (although a hybrid form of democracy and aristocracy like, say, Madison preferred, might be an even lesser one). But new technology brings new possibilities and we should ask ourselves whether there are not better ways of achieving the goals we have when we settle for democratic governance.

For now, I think I might just call myself a non-traditional democrat, if for no other reason than the ostracism that someone who said they were opposed to democracy would likely face in today's political climate. But really, this is not a stretch, because I have strong Enlightenment values that lead me to favor democratic outcomes, just not procedures based on popular sovereignty. (Perhaps I will write more about this later.)

And now for something completely different...

2007-08-08T01:16:00.000-07:00

Let's talk about a topic I almost never consider: sports.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't care about something like Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's record. (Back in the day, when I was in my early teens, I was a huge baseball fan for some reason. Now I find the game painfully boring and would never watch it on TV.) However, I was taken aback by this article by some sports writer named Dan Wetzel.

Bonds has hit 756 home runs, the most ever, but it isn't just the number that comes with a performance-enhancing-inspired asterisk. It's Bonds himself, it's baseball as a whole, it's an era of sports where rule-breaking is rampant and honest heroes such as Henry Aaron are in the shortest of supplies....

If this was supposedly the making of history, then realize history isn't going to make much of this. Ten, 30, 50 years from now, it will be looked upon with bewilderment – did people really celebrate a phony number that punctuated a fraudulent era of the game? No one will give much credence to what happened in Major League Baseball from, say, 1996 to the advent of mandatory steroids testing.

The truly naive one here, however, is Mr. Wetzel if he thinks that baseball will be the same game in 50 years. Steroids is only the tip of the human enhancement iceberg. What happens when you start having genetically modified players or cybernetically enhanced ones?

You can disallow these things (so long as they are detectable) but eventually they will become so common that you might have a repetition of the split that took place in bodybuilding, in which an "anything goes" level of competition was implemented to allow for a separate "natural" series of events.

I find sports a diversion, but it will likely undergo even more radical changes in the future at just about every level. It is absurd to think that the performance enhancement era is at a close because of steroid testing. If this is a problem now, it's only going to get worse when more and more drugs and procedures become available.

But really, what is particularly naive is the simplistic natural/unnatural distinction that Wetzel unthinkingly reiterates. Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, there's a gene that can be modified to allow for enhanced pitching ability, hyper-fastballs and so forth. What difference does it make whether a mutation occurs randomly in some gamete or whether it was induced in a lab?

Moreover, are the training regimens that players use today "natural"? Aren't they also a type of technology that enhances performance?

Of course, when you start to ask questions like these, you begin to see how silly the competitiveness of sports is--perhaps even human competitiveness in general. When we see a record being broken what we have is the confluence of certain biological dispositions and a developmental history that allows greater expression of the potential(s) in question.

Perhaps someday the world will, say, see someone run a 3 minute mile--perhaps this person will even be born "naturally" and not take any drugs or have any special surgeries or anything like that. Given enough time and enough people (along with greater recognition of natural talents and better training programs designed to exploit them) you could see just about any record broken. But what of it?

And if it is so thrilling, how would "unnatural" record breaking be any less thrilling? Isn't that still some amazing human accomplishment? If certain games became too easy, new challenges are always waiting to be found.

And in team sports like baseball, enhanced batters would have to be up against enhanced pitchers and fielders, for example, so that you'd have the kind of "arms race" you see in nature between predators and prey. There'd remain some equilibrium that would allow for the "excitement" of competition. (Here, it'd be going a bit too far perhaps if I simply said the cure for performance enhancement was... more performance enhancement. But I'd like to say that.)

Sports may be dumb, but sports writers can be even dumber. (That might be a fun final line, but even I recognize it's grossly unfair. This issue of enhancement is a serious one in which there are many implications and much room for reasonable disagreement. It would be interesting if Bonds' achievement provoked dialogue in this direction.)

Pain

2007-08-05T04:30:00.000-07:00

(Forgive me for the rambling and verbose nature of this post; I may write another later with a more concise statement of what I'm trying to say, but right now I am thinking as I write. Even more than in my usual habit of posting, this is an exercise done for the sake of aiding in reflection. I highly recommend the post immediately previous to this one, if you're looking for something coherent.)

Utilitarianism functions on basically two simple premises: "pain is bad" and "pleasure is good". Combined with a kind of reductive mechanistic conception of the universe, its logical conclusion is found in the example of Dave Pearce and his Hedonistic Imperative, about which I have written before.

The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life.

The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture - a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event.

Mr. Pearce is just about the most consistent person I've ever had the opportunity to speak with. While the value of consistency is debatable, I think it important that individuals who are sympathetic to utilitarianism realize what their ideals would lead to--and I have had my utilitarian moments.

Recently, I have been working on a paper on Nietzsche and the value of pain and suffering which has exploded for me the simplistic stance of the utilitarian. Upon further reflection, there is far more taken for granted than the pain=bad/pleasure=good equivalence.

One possibility I hope to open up with my investigations is a more refined utilitarianism, one with a more sophisticated understanding of pleasure and pain. With such a view, a precise hedonistic calculus would be impossible--but, of course, not even Bentham was able to come up with an applicable instance.

Let me venture this: the appeal of utilitarianism today is due to the difficulty with which we moderns have with the assignment of intrinsic value. A plurality of conceptions of the good--to use the classical language of liberal political theory--leads us to doubt that anything is simply valuable in itself. All goods are instrumental, it seems, only good for certain other purposes. Under such a formulation, though, the real questions of morality are dodged--this is a valuable insight to be taken from critical theory--because an instrumental logic can foster any purpose, from ending poverty to systemic genocide.

So what does the liberal or pragmatist or modernist have to fall back on? I think there are actually two slightly different but related answers to this question. First is the obvious case of pleasure and pain. If anything is intrinsically good or bad, these seem to be the most likely candidates. Second is a notion taken from William James' oft-cited "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life", in which demand--desire--is what is taken as primary. Something is desirable only if it is desired--and indeed John Stuart Mill uses this proposition to argue for the validity of his system.

Even here we can start to see that pain and pleasure are a bit more complex than they might at first seem, because of their relation to desire (not to mention other human affect). Allow me to leave pleasure to one side, because I think pain is the more interesting case, and much of what I say about it applies to pleasure.

As far as I can discern, there are at least 3 aspects to any pain: 1) the "hurt", the raw visceral feel of pain, pain as sensation; 2) nociception, i.e., the information that pain conveys, such as the report of (potential) tissue damage; and 3) a desire, viz., that one not be having the experience that one is having, a demand that things be otherwise.

There is a significant question about how separable these different aspects are. Individuals who are unable to experience 1, also do not experience 3, and fail with respect to 2. These individuals tend not to live very long because, so it seems to me, nociception is the adaptive aspect of pain, its evolutionary raison d'etre. This is one example, in which a mutation led to the incapacity to feel pain. Perhaps it is the case that 1 & 3 are inseparable, that it is the very nature of pain to desire that things be otherwise, or that the hurt of pain inevitably leads to this desire. It's hard to say precisely. A good test would be if people are capable of feeling pain but "not care" so to speak. I think I've heard of such examples, but I can't seem to find any medical/scientific references right now.

What Pearce wants to do, basically, is find an alternative pathway for nociception that doesn't "hurt". In other words, if possible, he wants to find a way that allows for the transmission of information about tissue damage that causes--and this is vital--the body to react in the appropriate way. We could think of it as something like a more advanced reflex. Does this mean he wants to eliminate 1 or 3 or both? For the sake of argument, let's say both, since we know that movement can be caused by things other than desire.

But when we start to advance this analysis, we see that what is taken to be valuable is not simply pleasure and the absence of pain, but also something like survival, self-preservation. If this were not the case, then it would be just as desirable that there be no conscious life at all, or that there only be organisms that are in a constant state of bliss with automatic systems working to prolong this capacity.

Nietzsche's reflections further complicate this picture. In The Gay Science he says a number of remarkable things about pain, e.g., that violent stimuli as such are neither painful nor pleasant but must be interpreted one way or the other by the body, that those who complain the most about pain are the ones who experience it the least--a brilliant insight almost certainly true--and that pain has value insofar as it produces individuals who are not simply mediocre. Contrary to what might be argued, he doesn't simply replace pleasure with "health" or "life-affirmation" or something like that; he even suggests that his notoriously erratic health has value because of the insight and different perspectives that it affords.

Moreover, there is not just one kind of health, or one kind of suffering, for that matter. Utilitarianism is essentially a universalistic approach to ethics, which assumes that the pain/pleasure experienced by different beings is comparable and interchangeable.

Personally, I think that I must give up utilitarianism's ambition to find a source of intrinsic value in an otherwise instrumental world. Let us ask the question, what is pain good or bad for? I don't want to be romantic or sensualist here, and take any kind of experience as worthwhile simply for being something new and different, but it seems to me that even the undesirable aspect of pain, whatever that may be, has effects we would consider positive.

I think one of the biggest problems with America today is its relative isolation from suffering, death, poverty, and all the various unpleasantnesses of the world. There is something to the idea that suffering builds character. Yet part of me wants to say, what's so great about character? Would it be bad to be extremely sensitive to pain in a world in which pain scarcely existed?

What if it were possible to transmit the memory of pain w/o the pain itself? We could learn the lessons of pain without having to feel it. A real question that Nietzsche raises is whether a diminution in the capacity for pain entails a similar reduction in the ability to feel pleasure. I think this is a more complicated question than could be answered by saying something like, "the neural pathways/specific brain chemicals/genetic determinants of pain and pleasure are distinct".

What about other unpleasant affects? Personally, I detest fear, probably even more than I do pain. Is fear painful? Not exactly, but I doubt that Mr. Pearce would be satisfied with a world that abolished pain but let fear remain. What about anger? Righteous anger can be a pleasant feeling, but one can get burnt out feeling angry all the time--one reason why I've practically stopped following American politics, at least for a while.

What about desire itself? Doesn't any kind of desire demand something different? Would we want all desires instantly to be satisfied? Stoicism and Buddhism agree in seeing desire as the source of all suffering, but most of us would not want to minimize our desires as they advocate--and it's certainly foreign to the consumer capitalist spirit. Desire is a great example because it is, by its nature, a source of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction.

---

What I'm hoping to do is raise some questions about the moral status of pain and suffering. While a world without either is still entirely fantastical, it is helpful to reflect on what we think makes life valuable or disvaluable.

I would like to suggest that what is least desirable--in the ethical sense--is sadness, in the Spinozan sense. Sadness is simply the feeling that accompanies a diminution in power. It is, in a sense, the counterpart of eudaimonia. Unlike other kinds of suffering--that is, undergoing, experiencing--sadness makes the individual less open to experience and less inclined to action. Sadness slows the speed of thought, and focuses the mind on a small number of fixed ideas; it reduces motivation and colors the entire world.

But even here, I cannot help but wonder if there isn't a beauty in sadness? Or is this simply a pretense? Would we not do well to take to heart another teaching of Nietzsche's, that what human beings truly cannot stand is the meaninglessness of suffering? Do we make sadness beautiful to make it easier to bear?

I feel like Descartes at the beginning of the 2nd Meditation. When you begin to ask questions not simply concerning the satisfaction of desires but about what ought to be desired in the first place--particularly in this nihilism-inducing postmodern world--you are going to run into trouble.

It seems to me I have come up against a reason why the social engineering of utopianism is problematic. Value is the creation of a historical process. There is simply no ground to stand on if you try to start from scratch. I think there is some truth to what James suggest about desire as the only possible source of desirability, except that desires should be differentiated more than just according to their intensity. Some desires, like self-preservation and self-development (self-enhancement?) are more important because they make other desires possible.

Nietzsche asks the question of the value of systems of valuation. Is value itself valuable? Should we desire more desire? Is not the quiescence and perpetual satisfaction of the utopian ideal--not to mention the ideal of heaven--indistinguishable from death? Is life anything more than conflict, suffering, desire, will to power?

I have no clue. To continue to speak in Nietzschean terms, my will to truth here is effectively trumping all of my other drives. Maybe I should just pick some value scheme and go with it. I mean, whose judgment do I really care about here, other than my own? I think I might just go with the whole transhumanism thing, because it's interesting and unpopular.

Against "Against Happiness"

2007-07-12T02:56:00.000-07:00

But should alienation always be eliminated? Some lives are better than other kinds of lives, regardless of the psychological well-being of the person who is living them. And some kinds of lives are so soul-deadening that we might worry more about a person who was not alienated. Is the happy slave really better off than the alienated slave? Is a medicated Sisyphus obviously better off than an unmedicated Sisyphus? Is there not something disturbing about trying to medicate that alienation away?

Kramer seems to miss this point. He argues that in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus had imagined Sisyphus happy, despite the fact that the gods had intended Sisyphus to suffer. But the happiness or unhappiness of Sisyphus is not the issue. What is the issue is the wisdom of making psychological well-being the sole measure of a successful life. It is not hard to see why a psychiatrist would put Sisyphus on Prozac. Prozac might well help Sisyphus push the boulder up the mountain more enthusiastically. Sisyphus might even appreciate the prescription. Yet this would not mean that Sisyphus had a mental health problem. Sisyphus is in a predicament, and to understand his predicament you cannot simply look at his internal psychological state. You must also understand his circumstances. Given the fact that he will be pushing the boulder up the mountain for eternity, alienation seems like an appropriate response. [emphasis added]

This moving passage is from Carl Elliott's poignant review, entitled "Against Happiness", reviewing Peter Kramer's book Against Depression. Kramer is well known for his Listening to Prozac, an early account of the impact that antidepressants could have on people's lives, well Elliott is the author of the excellent Better Than Well, a "diagnosis" of the American cultural anxiety surrounding the tension between ideals of authenticity and self-improvement. I've read all 3 of these works and I would recommend all of them to individuals interested on this issue.

Elliott finds that Kramer's polemical new book, which tries to argue against people who romanticize depression, is aimed for an audience that scarcely exists. And insofar as it is targeted at an American audience, this is to a large extent right. When I read Against Depression, this did not occur to me, because as an academic in the humanities, I encounter people who try to justify depression all of the time, along with those who decry the overuse of antidepressants and other psychopharmaceuticals.

Regardless of whether the book has an audience, it does address a serious issue. Elliott gets at the heart of the matter in the portion I emphasized above: Should psychological wellbeing--happiness as most Americans understand it--be "the sole measure of a successful life"? This is a question I have struggled with for a few years now--perhaps since I started taking antidepressants myself--and the only response that makes sense to me is "yes".

Even though Elliott does a better job than most in his attack on the "medicalization" of what were once considered character traits (drunkenness as alcoholism, awkwardness as social anxiety, sadness as depression, etc.), the force of his appeal must ultimately be an emotional one. In fact, it's the very same appeal that you find in all kinds of arguments against the use of enhancement technologies on humans. Elliott asks, don't we find this whole business a little disturbing?

A lot of people do. I for one don't. Yes, sadness does have a function in human life. Yes, widespread alienation in the developed world is likely a consequence of the ways in which these societies are organized. Yes, it's a luxury that we even have the opportunity to think about questions of happiness--I was recently reminded of how, for so many, practical matters associated with survival and making a living rule out consideration of such things--let alone to choose many of the conditions of our lives according to whether we think we'll find them fulfilling.

But what does that matter to me as a depressed individual? I cannot change the fact--or at least, I would certainly not want to--that I live in an affluent society that allows me to pay little attention to basic issues of survival. Right now it's unfair, but I think this is a better way to live and I would love to see it more prevalent throughout the world, because it's a way of life that allows us to ask questions of how we ought to live. Moreover, we now live in an age in which we can inquire not only about the requirements of living and of living well, but also of the possibility of living "better than well".

Of course this makes a lot of people uncomfortable. One reason I think this is so, although Elliott doesn't explicitly raise it, is that the existence of this possibility depends on a lot of social conditions which are unjust and produce a lot of unnecessary suffering. Besides America's various underclasses, there are many developing nations in which persons are ruthlessly exploited to produce cheap consumer goods. Similarly, many of us lack awareness of the sordid and bloody history of attaining and sustaining this affluence.

I think that this is an excellent point. In focusing on one's own individual contentment, it's easy to lose track of the massive amount of unjust suffering in the world. However--and this is my central argument against a position like Elliott's--while in a state of extreme sadness, one simply lacks the motivation and the energy to do something about that.

As Spinoza understands it, and rightly so I think, sadness is a recognition of our impotence, of the ways in which we are limited. Nothing is gained by feeling sad about something that cannot be changed--such as the past--and something is lost or at least endangered, viz., our capacity to do something positive, if we feel sad about those things which we might be able to affect.

While sadness might have some evolutionarily adaptive value, it is simply a counterproductive feeling and is by no means a necessary prerequisite of bringing about positive social change. Sadness is the real luxury, not happiness. Alienation may be "reasonable" or "appropriate" in our society, but it sure as hell won't change anything.

Let us return to the example of Sisyphus. Keeping in mind that his situation is fantastical, I think that especially for him what matters is happiness. He is stuck in a situation he has no power to change. What does it matter if he, as Elliott interprets Camus, is happy, not in the sense of emotional wellbeing, but only in the sense of being conscious of the absurdity of his predicament? In other words, what does it matter if he is alienated? Perhaps it makes us feel better that his is an "appropriate response" to his "predicament", but it does little for Sisyphus except perhaps give him some feeling of moral superiority, a slim consolation indeed compared to the tragedy of his infinite torment.

As Wittgenstein so aptly puts it, somewhere in his notebooks, "The world of the happy man is not the same as the world of the unhappy man." And the difference between the happy world and the unhappy world can be the only one that matters in our nihilistic age. (This last point I recently wrote a paper about, so I will not develop it further for right now. By nihilism, I mean something like recognition of the contingency of all structures of meaning. In other words, every belief or value is simply regarded as a choice among numerous others, with no criteria upon which to choose. Picture life in the existential shopping mall, to use philosopher James Edwards' analogy.)

I am not convinced that medicalizing life's woes is incompatible with social critique. The suffering that depression brings about is as real as the suffering of malnutrition, although different in kind. It is certainly tragic that so many ignore the latter kind of suffering, but the cure for this is not to be found in the former. In short, this is why I am against "Against Happiness" and for Against Depression.

Problems with Technology

2007-07-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

In preparation for a paper on Critical Theory and the critique of "Instrumental Rationality", I've been reading a number of articles in the philosophy of technology. As might be suspected from a discipline that has virtually eschewed any technological innovation--aside from the word processor, I can scarcely think of any concrete examples--most of them are critical, with some even celebrating their "Luddism".

Just today, I came upon a review for yet another book against genetic engineering by philosopher Michael Sandel, who I think I used to like. Called "The Case Against Perfection", it's typical of a certain class of problems that I'll explicate below. At least his critique seems somewhat novel, according to the reviewer, who calls it "half right".

Reading these various pieces has helped to clear up, in my own mind, what my general advocacy of technology more specifically entails, and where I am in agreement with its critics. To that end, I've been experimenting with a simple typology of problems, which I present in a draft form now.

I see two basic categories of problems, which I call "Problems of Destruction" and "Problems of Transformation". With respect to the former, I am on the same page with the most rabid of Luddites; it is the latter that I am less inclined to think of as problematic. Of course, these categories are not likely to be exhaustive--I can think of some examples which seem to fit into neither--nor mutually exclusive; they are simply schematic.

I) Problems of Destruction, as might be inferred, are those that deal with issues of survival. These include various threats to individuals, species, the environment, civilization, even life itself.

Certain fields like the recently emergent "synthetic biology"--a name I only came across days ago, but which already seems ubiquitous on the net--along with other sectors of biotechnology and nanotechnology have the potential to unleash massive devastation on par with nuclear holocaust (but without all that messy radiation). The engineering of a super-virus not found in nature or something like the infamous "gray goo" scenario (in which self-replicating nanobots are let loose and convert the entire biosphere into copies of themselves) would be examples of this.

(Artificial intelligence and robotics pose different kinds of threats, such as replacing human beings, which are considered by some as instances of the other class of problems. Insofar as an artificially intelligent civilization might mitigate the risk of other kinds of destruction, I find myself potentially sympathetic. This is an area I'll have to return to.)

Less destructive examples include pollution and other industrial processes which contribute to global warming, as well as more locally situated contaminations. The development of biofuels--undoubtedly the stupidest way of trying to resolve the energy crisis so unsurprisingly one championed by our president--poses significant dangers which have largely gone unrecognized. According to a recent report human beings already consume a quarter of nature's productive capacity, a figure which would be made even worse if fossil fuels were simply exchanged for biofuels.

Threats to the survival of human beings and other life would be regarded seriously by all but the most misanthropic. Efforts like the green energy movement and oversight of the most dangerous areas of research would be in our best interest. Those who resist these measures are simply not examining long-term consequences. Unfortunately, some major corporate players fall into this camp as a consequence of our brand of capitalism which is incapable of looking ahead more than a couple of years, usually being focused on this quarter's earnings and whatnot.

II) Problems of Transformation are more problematic in their problematicity. (As ugly as that last sentence is, it conveys what I want to say tersely.) Sandel's diatribe against genetic engineering is but one of a broad range of examples. In essence, what I'm calling "transformations" involve significant alterations to established ways of life, some more profound than others.

Since at least the industrial revolution, we have undergone a number of significant transformations. We live very differently than did our ancestors. The more conservative elements of society are likely to lament this as a loss, but most people are happy to call this "progress". I use the more neutral term "transformation" to avoid overt bias, even though I tend more often than not to fall into the latter camp. (Also, it's foolish to view a change as progressive simply in virtue of the fact that it is novel.)

The largest areas of concern today seem to be the potentially radical transformations to human beings that come from "enhancement technologies" such as genetics and cybernetics. Many critics contend that the blurring of boundaries occasioned by such interventions threaten our "humanity", "dignity", "meaning", or whatever other romantic buzzword one cares to use. In the very least, I grant them that not all "enhancements" will necessarily be improvements.

The more sophisticated critics realize that humans will (by and large) adapt to changes and take them for a new "normal"--and see this as part of the problem. However, it is difficult for such critiques to find purchase; either they rest on some dubious metaphysical ground, or they rely on the equally dubious strategy of taking certain characteristics of human beings--like the way that certain things disgust or frighten us--as essential. Quite frankly, I think "postmodern" intellectuals have no basis for criticizing transhumanism except their individual prejudices, which are only valid to those who share them.

Other examples of this would include heightening of the gap between technological elites and those without access. I'm inclined to think that such partitions are more a function of capitalism than a necessary consequence of technology. In fact, I see no way of finding positive alternatives to capitalism without significant technological change. Proponents of technology like to see this gap as more of a "lag"; the poor eventually do get access, as can be seen, e.g., in the spread of cell phones in the developing world.

I think that this Transformation category probably requires some greater specification since it covers such a broad range of issues. What's important to note is the way in which they tend to effect not merely our material circumstances, but also our beliefs, attitudes, and structures of meaning. The latter is what is most scary to people, but as an anti-essentialist, I am unconcerned.

Social critics will always find ways to complain of deficits of meaning in a society; conservatives will always long for the good old days that never were; but most people will adapt. Clinging to the old ways of life I see as a consequence of a couple of factors. Often, it's just greater fear of unknown evils than of known ones. When it's opposition to ostensible improvements, it's a way to make people feel better about the unnecessary suffering that they had to endure ("suffering is just a part of life!", "pain is what gives human existence meaning", "our imperfections constitute our humanness", and other such drivel).

Most likely, the intelligent inhabitants of earth a century from now (if there are any) would not appear "human" to most people today. As for me, I see no reason to cling to an evolutionary accident. What matters are things like rich experience, intelligence, reason, happiness, meaningfulness, benevolence, and so forth. Whether or not such beings think of themselves as "human", perhaps as some nostalgic sentiment, is to me entirely inconsequential. (I think an extension of the category of speciesism would be appropriate here.)

Why do I call myself an atheist?

2007-06-19T21:26:00.000-07:00

In researching this paper on Wittgenstein's philosophy of religion, I've been coming upon some really fascinating ideas. My understanding of what faith is and what it means to be religious has changed, and I think it valuable to attempt to apply this to my own particular faith, or lack thereof.

To begin, just like religion is many different things to many different people, so too is atheism. Thus, the answer I give will be above all a personal one. Other people may choose to take it up, and that might give me some measure of satisfaction, but by and large I'm indifferent.

In practice, I think the differences that I have from many religious believers, particularly those who are reflective and philosophically-inclined, are really not so great. A lot of it amounts to differences in the use of language.

I have no problem speaking in religious terms--I talk about God all the time, particularly when teaching. However, I feel no need to understand my life in terms of such categories. If I were to use the word "God" in speaking about my Weltanschauung, I would probably either follow Spinoza's usage and treat it as equivalent to nature (i.e., all that is, was, and ever will be), or use it as another way of talking about myself. I, of course, recognize that I am finite and imperfect, but nothing requires that God be otherwise except the conventions of particular faiths.

So, in short, I am an atheist because I have no need of God. In fact, I find very admirable the figure of Lucifer in Christian mythology. Not insofar as he as anything to do with human suffering--here, I'd be much more sympathetic to Jesus--but because he refuses to submit to God.

Following Wittgenstein, I see faith as, for the most part, an act of submission to authority. (It is no coincidence that Islam, for instance, is a word meaning "submission".) I submit to no one but myself, and so I am proud, but I see this as a virtue and not a sin (so long as the pride does not become overweening).

Incidentally, this is one reason I love the series His Dark Materials. Pullman does more than undermine traditional religion with this work. I see him as actually putting forth another ideal, which we might call the Republic of Heaven.

Most of us do not deal with God on a face-to-face basis, so the act of submission is in practice to worldly authorities--priests, politicians, religious communities, and so forth. Their invocation of God as ultimate authority is meant to put an end to questioning and independent thought; again, it is a call for submission. But why submit to God? Or if this is too objectionable, why submit to those who claim to speak for him?

In my own case, there is no good reason for unthinking obedience (under ordinary circumstances, but I can imagine exceptions). But I don't think this is by any means true of everyone. Nor do I condemn them for it. From some perspectives, reasoning and questioning authority only causes problems, leading people away from God and salvation, etc. It would be cruel of me to try to force people who are otherwise happy in their beliefs (however misguided I may find them) into another mode of thinking.

This point, in particular, is something I have wavered on. I've had my periods of militant, evangelical atheism. But why should I care about what other people believe? Unlike some, I have no salvation to offer. Nor have I access to some absolute truth or knowledge of some correct way of living. Religious tolerance is, to me, the only reasonable option.

In fact, it would be hypocritical of me to try to proselytize, since it is an activity that I find objectionable when practiced by others. Certainly, I can see why people do it, but here is a place where they cross the line between living in their own worlds of constructed meanings and attempting to infringe on mine.

But one can't help but wonder, what motivates proselytizing atheologians like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens? I can't speak for them, but I know in my own case, the reason is primarily emotional. I just do not care for religion. At times, I even hate it.

Here now we must tread with caution. What exactly am I saying when I say that I hate religion? Case in point: I watched, for the first time, the movie Gandhi last night. In this instance, we have religion serving as a means of uniting people and overcoming injustice. It would be inhuman of me to want to rid the world of examples like Gandhi. Here is a case where, unambiguously (because there's no question here, unlike in so many other cases, of an individual justifying the violation of the very rules his religion provides with the excuse that the end justifies the means) where religion is a boon to humanity.

That is an atypical example. More commonly, we find individuals who perhaps do no great goods for the world, but do affect the people in their communities positively with support from a religious worldview. These more neutral cases I am tempted to dislike, but only because of association. In all honesty, I have no good reason for experiencing the irritation I sometimes do when encountering the typical, harmless believer.

If I am to be reasonable, I must distinguish between the cases where religion is harmful, and those in which it is positive or neutral. I don't really hate religion, per se, but only those cases in which people use it to justify violence or some other form of oppression, or when it is used as the basis for making decisions which would better be made on the basis of scientific evidence and critical reasoning.

---

I've become sidetracked. Really, there are just a few key points that I see as distinguishing me from most religious believers.

1. I grant the existence of genuine loss, of meaningless, unnecessary suffering in the world. Things do not always turn out for the best. No cosmic being has a "plan" that will make everything okay in the end. Life is tragic.

Of course, I think granting this is not simply a cause for despair. The world may not be as we like it to, but sitting around and crying about it does no good. Instead, we should do the best we can to make things better, for ourselves and everyone else.

2. I recognize meaning as a human construction. In itself, the universe lacks purpose or direction. All that can be said of nature outside of the human world is that it is. It is not good or bad, beautiful or ugly, comic or tragic. It simply is.

However, this does nothing to undermine all our structures of meaning. Even though I recognize any way of understanding the world as ultimately contingent, I do so within my own structures of meaning. One can never step outside of these--or if one could, one can say nothing about it, nothing meaningful (this should be self-evident).

There is no Archimedean point, no ground for neutral criticism of any worldview. If I take objection to someone's way of looking at life, if I call it unreasonable, I am presupposing a standard of reasonability (and, moreover, presupposing that reasonability is something valuable itself) that is, perhaps regrettably, not shared by everyone.

3. Lastly, as I have said before, but almost as a consequence of the previous two points, I have no need to use religious language in my own case. No cosmic being has my back, or cares in the slightest about me. The only support is that which I receive from other human beings. But this is enough for me.

In saying that, I realize that I am fortunate and that many people are not able to live this way. (Personally, I see this newly discovered strength as a consequence of the mental health treatment I've been receiving over the past several years.)

I also reject other religious conceptions without negative consequence. I deny freedom of the will, and yet I feel freer than before, insofar as I feel more self-determined (granting that I am only in this position as a result of contingencies totally beyond my control). I deny personal immortality, and yet death does not concern me, but only encourages me to make the most of the life that I have. I deny transcendent ethical categories, but feel no less committed to leading a life that is ethical by human standards.

I may be living proof that one does not need to be religious to lead a decent life (and I am not alone; many in the 17th century were perplexed by the case of Spinoza, a man who led a virtuous and happy life--he saw these two as coextensive--but who was regarded as an atheist).

I feel confident and self-sufficient, able to live without consolation. I'm perhaps happier than I've ever been, including those times when I was a believer (if for no other reason than I no longer am plagued by doubts about the truth of my worldview).

Moreover, I am not exempt from ethical concerns. Even though I recognize that no one is keeping score and that I stand to gain nothing from it directly, I still strongly desire to diminish suffering in the world. Watching the story of Gandhi really made this hit home for me. I felt more keenly the suffering of others than I have in quite some time.

Usually, I maintain a certain kind of distance, a general coping strategy that I tend to employ often (and unconsciously), to keep me from getting caught up in all the world's pain. Last night, I felt it. But even though it hurt, I ultimately felt the better for it.

I know now--and this is something I had doubts about before--that deep down I am a compassionate person. If I can care for my fellow living creatures when I stand to gain nothing from it, that can only mean that I am a good person. I hope this to be a countervailing force to many of my self-centered tendencies.

I can see firsthand how Spinoza can ground ethics in (enlightened) self-interest. Part of my self-interest is an interest in others. Regardless of the circumstances of my own life, I could not be fully satisfied in the face of rampant injustice and suffering.

---

If I had more time, I might organize these thoughts more coherently. I may incorporate some of them into the paper I'm writing, although they are on the personal side. I don't know that I've answered my initial question (I neglected to mention the strategic/prudential considerations, e.g., in the circles I run in, being an atheist is viewed favorably), but it is good to write out one's thoughts.

An Informal Review of The Courtier and the Heretic

2007-06-18T03:17:00.000-07:00

As I begin to turn my thoughts to a paper on the philosophy of religion, I found myself this evening (which has now turned into this morning) gripped by a fascinating piece of intellectual history, viz., Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. I had read something like the first 5 chapters over the span of nearly a month, but tonight I just couldn't put the book down (when I tried to do so, I inevitably returned to picking it back up).

To begin with, Stewart is an excellent writer. This is a topic I already find interesting, but I think that he does an admirable job making something esoteric profoundly interesting and, above all, human. He takes to heart the Nietzschean maxim he cites that philosophies are merely expressions of the temperaments of their creators; the story he tells is more about the men and the times in which they lived than their ideas.

What little is known of Spinoza's life is something I'm already familiar with, but I knew next to nothing about Leibniz. Stewart's analysis of the two figures is perhaps a bit too neat to be accurate, but it makes for a wonderful account that is not totally implausible.

I find it difficult to determine which philosopher he sides with. More of the book is devoted to Leibniz (in part because he lived so much longer) but Leibniz characterized as a reaction to Spinoza.

In terms of the exposition of the two thinkers' philosophies, Stewart does an admirable job for a popular work. I can speak less for Leibniz, but on many of the most important points, he gets Spinoza right. He rightly recognizes Spinoza primarily as an ethical and political thinker (so too, Leibniz, for which he provides evidence ample enough to convince me at least).

He uses a few turns of phrase I don't care for: e.g., he talks about Spinoza's "parallelism" while simultaneously describing it as distinctly not that (unless a single line can be parallel to itself). Extension and thought are two aspects of the same nature, and he clearly understands this, so in what sense is this "parallel"? To me that seems a better epithet for something like Malebranche's fantastical "occasionalism" or even Leibniz's "preestablished harmony". He also follows Shirley in rendering what is better translated as "joy" and "sorrow" into the unduly austere terms "pleasure" and "pain".

The way he connects the two philosophers to two fundamentally different reactions to modernity is compelling, if a bit overstated. While throughout the work he is trying to argue for a greater than recognized influence of Spinoza (albeit a negative one) on Leibniz, his own thinking really comes to the fore in the closing chapter. I love the way that he unapologetically lumps Heidegger and the Postmodernists into the same camp as Kant and Hegel, essentially imitators of Leibniz's reactionary stance. It is by no means fair to these thinkers, but it is certainly amusing to imagine the reactions of their contemporary proponents.

He also makes a solid case for my suspicion that Locke is largely a hack who stole Spinoza's ideas without crediting him because he was too controversial. And in a few short paragraphs he demolishes the established practice of calling Spinoza and Leibniz, along with Descartes, "rationalists".

Do I regard Spinoza as a champion of modernity, as Stewart clearly maintains? I suppose it depends on what we understand by modernity, but Spinoza undoubtedly embodies many of the greatest values of the Enlightenment and was a thinker centuries ahead of his time. The world that we live in now, I think, is constituted largely by this struggle between the proponents of a secular society and a great hodgepodge of reactionary forces. On this note, Stewart's closing passages are particularly apt (the bracketed insertions are my own, obviously):

Leibniz was a man whose failings were writ as large as his outsized virtues. Yet it was his greed, his vanity, and above all, his insatiable, all too human neediness that made his work so emblematic for the species. With the promise that the cruel surface of experience conceals a most pleasing and beautiful truth, a world in which everything happens for a reason and all is for the best, the glamorous courtier of Hanover made himself into the philosopher of the common man. [What audacity! To claim a thinker so abstruse as Leibniz to be "of the common man" is obscene. I love it!] If Spinoza was the first great thinker of the modern era, then perhaps Leibniz should count as its first human being.

Spinoza, on the other hand, was marked from the start as a rara avis. [Philosophers cannot resist showing off their familiarity with dead languages even in purportedly popular works.] Given his eerie self-sufficiency, his inhuman virtue, and his contempt for the multitudes, it could not have been otherwise. [I think this is a bit overstated, and partially a product of our lack of knowledge about the circumstances of Spinoza's life.] Yet the message of his philosophy is not that we know all that there is to know; but rather that there is nothing that cannot be known. Spinoza's teaching is that there is no unfathomable mystery in the world; no other-world accessible only through revelation or epiphany; no hidden power capable of judging or affirming us; no secret truth about everything. There is instead only the slow and steady accumulation of many small truths; and the most important of these is that we need expect nothing more in order to find happiness in this world. His is a philosophy for philosophers, who are as uncommon now as they have always been. [An obvious allusion to Spinoza's final thought in the Ethics: "all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare". I take this as evidence that he ultimately favors Spinoza, but I'm not always so sure.]

In contrast to the suggestion of this poetic denouement, I recommend Stewart's book to philosophers and non-philosophers alike. Finding decent popular accounts of Spinoza's philosophy is nearly impossible, and while Stewart has his flaws, the beauty of the historical narrative alone makes it worth reading. To everyone (and I know there are so many of you who read this) curious to understand what I find so remarkable about Spinoza, this is not a bad place to start.

What exactly is natural selection?

2007-05-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

I am no scientist--my background in the sciences is, at best, patchy--but I try to learn what I can about the natural sciences. I can't help myself from voraciously consuming news of the latest breakthroughs (for instance, check this out), or from spending hours on Wikipedia reading articles on quantum mechanics that I can scarcely comprehend, or from dabbling in a little philosophy of science now and then.

One issue that has long fascinated me is evolution. A few years ago, I read Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and was impressed by the way he connected evolution to other physical phenomena. If we think about things in terms of the probability that they should exist--this is highly speculative but bear with me--we would expect to find, for instance, things that last a long time (like rocks) or that are frequently produced (like clouds). But add in something that can replicate itself--but does so imperfectly--and the history of life on this planet seems like a foregone conclusion. (This is a partial response to creationist "arguments" concerning the improbability of life.)

I've also had debates with colleagues about evolution, trying to argue on premises like Dawkins' that natural selection (leaving aside the phenomena of mutation/variation and genetic drift, which are in some ways more straightforward, as generators of a kind of "randomness") is a general physical process not specific to biological organisms. Even higher-level phenomena like culture and technology, I would say, undergo an analogous process in their development.

As it turns out there are physicists who are trying to argue exactly this. A common "criticism" leveled by creationist idiots is that life is incompatible with the second law of thermal dynamics (viz., that entropy in a closed system increases over time). Contrary to what we might think, living things actually do more to increase entropy than do non-living things. One physicist in particular, Roderick Dewar, has even argued that what natural selection is really selecting for is not something vague like "fitness" but rather "maximum entropy production" (MEP):

Dewar has shown that MEP is the most probable behavior of an open, nonequilibrium system made up of many interacting elements, provided that system is free to “choose” its state and not subject to any strong external forces.... The large-scale state of MEP represents the largest proportion of the countless possible arrangements of the system's microscopic parts, regardless of what those parts are up to.

Natural selection in biology could work the same way, Dewar thinks: “In physics, to speak of natural selection is to ask, among all possible states, which is the one that nature selects.” This, he points out, is a question of probability. “The state that nature selects is the one that can be realized in more ways than any other. Biologists don't think like that, but I want to entertain the hypothesis that natural selection in biology works the same way, and see where that gets us.”

The issues here are actually quite complex, and I encourage you to read the whole article, which includes opposing points of view and an alternative theory about increasing matter and energy "flow"--did someone say "Heraclitus"?

Part of what we're dealing with is a question about the distinction between living and non-living things, but it also pertains to the issue of scientific reductionism: is biology ultimately explicable in terms of physics? Personally, I'm inclined to believe in emergent properties that require "higher" levels of description to account for.

In any case, I think it advantageous to see natural selection as a more general--dare I say metaphysical?--principle. Some have even argued that a kind of selection operates between different universes--although this is too speculative to entertain as anything more than a neat idea. When it comes down to it, we may not be able to ask why there is something rather than nothing, but the question of why this something rather than another may be in bounds.

Emotions and Reason: Together at Last

2007-05-03T17:37:00.000-07:00

The emotion-reason connection has now bled through to popular media, as evidenced in this Boston Globe article:

Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.

[...]

Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at USC, has played a pivotal role in challenging the old assumptions and establishing emotions as an important scientific subject. When Damasio first published his results in the early 1990s, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions should be a better thinker, since their cortical computer could process information without any distractions.

But Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease.

Besides Damasio (whose Looking for Spinoza is a must read!), the article makes reference to other theorists who I've been in the habit of reading, Jon Haidt and Josh Greene.

Spinoza, of course, goes unmentioned, but again we find that he was centuries ahead of his time.

(Tangential Remarks: Recently, I've been toying with some unusual interpretations of Spinoza, not so far from Damasio's neuroscience-infused account of the mind-body relationship. For instance, the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics would be consistent with Spinoza's claim that everything that is possible exists.

Now I'm not so brash as to claim that Spinoza anticipated modern physics, anymore than he anticipated evolution with his outstanding refutation of intelligent design in Ethics I Appendix. Rather, like Damasio has argued with respect to the brain, Spinoza provides a framework for thinking about the sciences that is far preferable to other paradigms, like the Cartesian.

In a similar vein, Spinoza also seems to have a notion of identity as continuing proportion which meshes nicely with current ideas about identity as patterns of information--which has now led me to believe that mind uploading is possible [particularly if the upload is gradual, but perhaps even in the case of instantaneous transfer or the activation of a "backup" copy--imagine being able to "save" your life story!--it's something I've wanted to do for as long as I've been playing RPGs].

These recent ideas, which are extremely exciting, have spawned from my recent reading of Hans Moravec's brilliant 1988 work Mind Children. Moravec's solution to the problem of consciousness copying strikes me as brilliant, if extremely counterintuitive.

I hope to write more on this work at some other point, because it's been extremely fruitful for my thinking: so much so, that I think the more appropriate title would be Mind Fuck [which would be a natural predecessor to Mind Children, anyway.] The first 100 pages can be a bit boring, especially since he dabbles in what's state of the art for 1988 [i.e., even before the Internet], but beginning with the fourth chapter's discussion of the Robotic Bush [not the George variety, but the branching kind] things take a turn for the surreal-yet-plausible.)

Upon Further Reflection...

2007-03-22T00:20:00.000-07:00

The musings of yesterday evening did not quite sit well with me, even immediately after writing them. While I do think the problem of technology is of vital importance, my feeling is that some of my political conclusions were over-hasty. I was caught up in the rush of radical new ideas and just got carried away. This post is a more critical take on some of the issues raised previously.

When one reaches conclusions that clash dramatically with the sensibilities of most others, it's a good idea to try to understand as well as possible what really underlies these conclusions, and whether they rest on secure foundations. Thus, I want to consider this from at least two perspectives. One is the rational and evidentiary basis of the claims, while the other is more psychological, looking at the factors that motivate the creation of the arguments.

First, it seems yesterday's conclusions depend on a number of presuppositions which I either failed to mention or inadequately argued for. The prediction of rapid progress is premised on the continuation of a trend that so far shows no signs of slackening, but it is far from certain that the conditions which support it will be stable.

While I mentioned the possibility of an apocalyptic disaster which other wiped out or species or at least destroyed a good chunk of it and ended civilization as we know it, I didn't consider other, more minor catastrophes which might serve to delay or reverse scientific progress. For example, the looming specters of global warming and the energy crisis constituted by the depletion of fossil fuels are significant problems which I've been content to lump in with other problems having merely technological solutions. It may be the case that we find new, cleaner sources of energy, or technological fixes to reverse the effects of excessive carbon emissions, but this is far from certain. One could raise other problems as well: instability caused by economic collapses and shifts in the balance of political power, wars over certain limited resources like oil, and so forth.

On top of that, there may be certain things which are just not physically possible to achieve, or that come with such adverse side effects as not to be worth pursuing. One could imagine certain genetic augmentations that disrupt a finely balanced natural system, or the problem of creating software to use all our powerful computing hardware to its fullest capacity, to name just two.

Next, in terms of the basis of the normative claims, it is by no means obvious that greater intelligence necessitates better judgment or wisdom. My inclination is to believe that this would be the case, but it's something of an empirical question, although one that is simultaneously normative since the meaning of better judgment is itself a question of ethical/political judgment. Furthermore, I downplayed the possibilities of other reasons why letting greater-than-human artificial intelligences decide for us might be undesirable. One such instance would be the importance for well being of the sense of being free to decide for oneself, determine the course of one's own life, etc.

Moving on to the second view, I find that psychologically my motivation in the previous post is highly misanthropic, in addition to being highly anti-natural. Now, granted, that I think this hatred of natural processes and of human beings is justified, but there are some serious repercussions to being so motivated. In the least, I need to offer a better justification for this attitude.

For the first time in my quarter-century or so of life, I have broken a bone. It happened I think about a month ago, but I didn't notice any effects of it until I started feeling pain in my right foot about two weeks ago, and it was not confirmed until just today after I had X-rays taken. Suffice it to say that it has reminded me of the frailty of human bodies.

Similarly, although it places me in a camp with some of the most violently ascetic individuals in history, there are many things that annoy me about the kinds of bodies that we have: all the effort that is required to maintain physical hygiene, the inefficiency of many systems, the unpleasant wastes that our bodies produce, the way that we get so easily tired by sustained activity, etc.

My body in particular is not in the greatest of shape, even after I devote considerable time to habits of maintenance. I have never been particularly strong or fast or resilient. Frankly, if not for safety concerns, I think I would be one of the first in line for a prosthetic body if such a thing should be developed. As it stands, I can easily imagine myself voluntarily opting for cybernetic limbs to replace my perfectly healthy ones, once these are safe and indistinguishable from natural limbs.

All of these shortcomings are to be expected by the unintelligent design of blind evolutionary forces. Unfortunately, as imperfect as they are they are still exceedingly complex, having reached solutions to problems of organization that we are not even aware of at the present. I think we will eventually design better bodies, but it may be quite some time. In the interim, the best option may just be to try to optimize the basic design that we do have, and this is a problem for biotech more than anything else.

Furthermore, I was explicit previously in my suggestion that suffering is pointless and worthless, but this is a bit of an overgeneralization. Pain certainly has an evolutionary function, which involves, among other things, learning how to respond to complex environments. What I see as another unfortunate consequence of nature's blind designs is that pain seems to accomplish the task of learning far more readily than does pleasure.

I have seen evolutionary justifications for this empirical fact, such as the far greater cost imposed by death (which must in turn be avoided to the greatest degree possible) versus the relatively small benefit accrued by successfully obtaining food for the day, or by one act of mating, and so forth. The consequence of this is that, on the whole, there is likely a far greater degree of pain than pleasure in the world, and to me this is simply unacceptable. On simple utilitarian grounds alone, it would be incumbent upon us to undertake to redesign natural processes as far as possible, so that we might reverse this pernicious trend with all its adverse consequences (e.g., the possibility of torture).

Lastly, on this note concerning my distaste for "nature" and "human nature", there are the myriad of social and political problems which I see as ultimately unresolvable. My contention is that most of these problems have at least two kinds of solutions, one of which is primarily social and the other of which is medical or otherwise technological.

For example, take the difficulties imposed on the handicapped in virtue of their injuries and defects. The problem here is fundamentally a mismatch between certain individuals and their social environments. To an extent, the environment can be altered: e.g., handicapped bathrooms and ramps are fairly common accommodations that society has made for those bound to wheelchairs.

But, rather than taking all that effort to redesign the environment--including some that are extremely difficult to change, viz., opinions and attitudes--we can attack the problem at an individual level. By screening for genetic defects, and by developing highly effective prosthetics, cures for paralysis, and so forth, we can simply eliminate the handicaps themselves. (And unlike the deplorable eugenics movements of the past, this totally avoids killing people; it simply remedies certain existing conditions and prevents certain genetic combinations from attaining life.)

Not all social problems may be resolvable on this model, but I believe that many of the causes of unhappiness in people can be so resolved, and this would be a major step forward. One can think of it as something like "applied stoicism": I change myself rather than my environment, because I have so little power over the latter.

In short, I like to see this as a problem of figuring out how reason can best overpower negative affects. I've been meaning to write a post to show why Spinoza would agree with me about all this technology stuff (and it's not even that big of a stretch, as I hope to show), but certainly we have a case here of people coming together (thus having more power than individuals alone) and crafting artifices which allow for more direct control of those things which disempower us. To my mind, that's what human enhancement truly is: the augmentation of our freedom.

Returning to the previous perspective (beliefs that underlie my conclusions), it is vital to note that certain conclusions I have reached concerning human freedom and divinity are essential presuppositions for me. I believe, but will not argue for here, that what is taken for free will is simply ignorance of the causes of our desires (for one excellent argument, see the invaluable Appendix to Spinoza's Ethics Part I). I maintain that the choices we are presented with when it comes to technological control are between numerous causes (of which we are ignorant) interacting in highly complex ways producing highly contingent effects, on the one hand, and more direct control based on scientific knowledge.

(As an aside, I use the word "choice" deliberately; I do not deny that we have the freedom to make choices. Rather, I maintain that the basis on which those choices are made consists of desires that are primarily the product of external forces--and to the extent that we can change our desires, this requires the operation of second order desires, whose origin will ultimately be derived from external factors.)

In short, the choice is between chance and ignorance, on the one hand, and control and knowledge on the other. To me, this is really no choice at all; only a fool would choose ignorance. The problem that most people face, and this is a point that B.F. Skinner, of all people, has made remarkably well, is that the external determination is more evident in cases of control (because, of course, we're ignorant in the more complex cases), so it's easier to see this as simply being manipulated. But, as I construe it, we're being determined to action either way; the path of knowledge though allows us to be more determined by our own nature, which is what I think true freedom is.

This should be sufficient for now. Let me to some extent rescind my previous rejection of certain democratic values, and leave them in a sort of questionable area, a matter of doubt requiring further reflection.

A 3rd Dimension in 21st Century politics

2007-03-21T02:11:00.000-07:00

I've begun reading Ray Kurzweil's most recent book The Singularity is Near. I'm tempted to call the man a visionary; his view of the world is profound and startling. It's got me thinking about some issues I've seen raised elsewhere, and I've come around to some political conclusions that are, to say the least, not mainstream.

In contemporary politics, a 2-dimensional model is sometimes proposed for plotting political views. Wikipedia has a nice discussion of the diversity of views on what constitutes the political spectrum. Many have seen the inadequacy of the left-right model, and have proposed alternatives, one of which is known as the "political compass" model (discussed in detail here), which is fairly representative of 2-axis accounts, so I will briefly discuss it.

The two axes are the social and the economic. On the economic side of things, you find a range of views from hardcore libertarianism and support of laissez-faire capitalism, on the right end, to various forms of communism and socialism, on the left. The range of views on economics is of course more complex than this, but it offers a rough guideline by focusing on the level of interference in an economy by the state or some other collective.

On the social axis, you have views that range from authoritarianism and the worship of tradition, on the right (actually, the top of the compass), to what they call libertarianism (it's probably appropriate to distinguish between economic and social libertarianism, as well as the political group that calls itself libertarian, whose members are often both) with its emphasis on personal freedoms, on the left (the bottom). The relevant characteristic here is a measure of permissibility, how much is left up to individuals to choose for themselves.

I trust these two axes are fairly straightforward. However, there a third dimension is emerging in 21st century politics, and will become extremely prominent very soon. My suggestion is that it warrants its own axis, since it does not map well with either of the other two. I think the easiest way to distinguish the ends are by calling them technoconservatives and technoprogressives, but you also might talk about the range as being from Neo-Luddite to Transhumanist. On either end, you find unlikely allies.

On the technoconservative side, you find environmental activists, religious fundamentalists, leftist academics (much to my chagrin; it makes me wish Brave New World were never written), and groups like the Amish. On the technoprogressive side, you have avowed transhumanists, technophiles of various sorts, avid consumers of gadgets and doodads, and even the occasional social conservative who sees technology as a means of "curing" the gay or as a great way to enforce law and order.

I view our culture as being far more technoconservative than technoprogressive, in spite of all the money we put into scientific and technological research. Yes, there is a sort of contradiction represented by our worship of progress and our insatiable consumer culture, but by and large Americans are weary of new technologies, particularly biotechnology like genetic engineering. Contrast us with nations like Japan, India, or Thailand, and you find far less support of, for instance, germline genetic augmentation, which many westerners are inclined to dismiss as scary "eugenics".

Carl Elliott has documented our tenacious relationship with human enhancement in Better Than Well, a text which I use in my intro philosophy class and one I highly recommend. What you find, Elliott suggests, is a tension in thinking about human identity between notions of authenticity and being true to yourself, and those of self-improvement and being all that you can be. And, in truth, this issue of technology is largely one of identity, although in a different sense than the trendy topic found in academia today.

The fact of the matter is that we will very soon be dealing with beings of our own creation who match and then exceed human capabilities. The extent to which this happens in part depends on how long the Luddites are able to hold off what I see as inevitable (or, inevitable so long as we do not destroy ourselves, which is actually a likely possibility).

But if the technoprogressives win out, we will see robots, genetically enhanced humans, humans who voluntarily integrate themselves with machines (cyborgs, they are often called), but also computerized intelligences without bodies properly speaking, as well as intelligences realized in new forms like molecular computing that call into question the living/non-living distinction, and then all the hybrids of these various types. Imagine the world of the "X-Men" combined with that of "Ghost in the Shell". Add in nanotechnology, and things get even more wacky--and all of this happening all at once.

Very soon, people will have no idea about what is human and who counts as a person deserving of legal and moral rights. In this era, the technoconservatives (or at least the social conservatives among their number) will probably limit humanity to the unenhanced and non-cybernetic. This group, which I like to think of as the Neo-Amish, may constitute a substantial portion of the population in the beginning. But ultimately, they will be unable to compete with their enhanced brethren (and good riddance!).

This picture of the world scares many people. It runs counter to our understanding of the equality of persons; when you talk about improving humans, you are talking about making some better than others. It essentially destroys the traditional human world. I think that it is more than likely--I'd say even 90% certain--that human beings, as we are constituted now, will be extinct by 2100. Either we will have destroyed our species, or we will have moved beyond it.

This is, as I see it, the last century of humanity. Because I far prefer augmenting humanity rather than eliminating it, I strongly support unimpeded technological development in the GNR (genetics, nanotechnology, robotics) fields. Now, some people oppose it for the same reason, since they see it as increasing the likelihood of human extinction, whether by some super-virus, a robot rebellion, or the destruction of life by omnivorous nanobots (the "gray goo" scenario). And to an extent, this is true.

However, I see a far greater threat in the form of the idiots who control our nuclear weapons. One of the problems with unenhanced humanity is constituted by our aggressive and tribal impulses that incline us to hate those different than us and go to great lengths to destroy them. The sooner the enhanced and machine intelligences take over the world, as far as I am concerned, the better. In short, for those of you who know the film, I see "I, Robot" as having an unhappy ending.

Now, this is a radical view politically. It makes me part ways with many democratic ideals. But the more I read about the exponential growth of technologies, the more inevitable it seems. Yes, we may ban a lot of biotech, but the change is coming faster than we can respond to. Ultimately, I think it's the machines who will triumph, because people will view advances in computing and robotics as relatively innocuous, until the robots and other machine intelligences become commonplace.

Before long, recognizing their superiority, the machines and their cybernetic allies will sweep the unenhanced out of power--hopefully nonviolently--and usher in a new era of peace and cooperation. My guess is that this would happen around mid-century. It behooves those of us with any sense to join them.

All this sentimental piffle about the flaws and sufferings that make human beings special should be recognized for the garbage that it is. Nietzsche articulates it perfectly: the one thing we cannot accept is the notion that our suffering is meaningless. Well, folks, like it or not, it mostly is. It's the product of blind chance, of complex natural processes that lack foresight, of the various idiocies that human beings foist upon themselves. A world with as little suffering as possible would be a far better world, and this will (I hope) be the world of the future, in which intelligence wins out over other natural forces.

Most of you who read this, although I know few do, will likely regard me as insane, or at least deluded. I say time will tell. Predicting the future is a difficult business, and I could likely be wrong. However, one thing I am quite confident in is my normative stance: human beings are ultimately unfit to govern themselves. You can arrange societies in only so many ways, some more preferable than others, but like a mosaic made out of dog shit, the substance with which you work will put serious limitations on how beautiful your finished product will be.

In the past, this view was simply used as a means for one group to gain power over another. We are "the well born", "the best men", the ones who speak directly to the gods, etc., etc. But, in the future, this pretense will become a reality. Let there be democracy amongst the enhanced, but most human beings have no idea about what is good for themselves. Certainly, the people are not equipped to recognize who among them would serve as the best leaders--George W. Bush is but one obvious example.

We should be honest with ourselves. Frankly, I see myself as lacking in these respects--certainly I lack the intelligence and wisdom to see how the world ought to be governed but, really, so do all human beings. For too long, we have been at the whims of fortune, but now that we have the possibility to become masters of fate, it is incumbent upon us that we do so.

I find myself with a new purpose, as an academic and a philosopher, which is to sell this vision of the world, to encourage people to put effort into making our radically different future as utopian as possible. More and more are waking up to the importance of the issue, but far too many react to it with revulsion. I hope to change that. In any case, this is really the defining issue of our time. Recognize it.

What's Wrong With American Democracy

2007-03-10T20:13:00.000-08:00

Among many other things, this.

For all the policy blueprints churned out by presidential campaigns, there is this indisputable fact: People care less about issues than they do about a candidate's character.

A new Associated Press-Ipsos poll says 55 percent of those surveyed consider honesty, integrity and other values of character the most important qualities they look for in a presidential candidate.

Just one-third look first to candidates' stances on issues; even fewer focus foremost on leadership traits, experience or intelligence.

Now this might not be such a big deal if it were actually possible to know the character of candidates. In theory, it seems that our leaders ought to be men and women of character. Perhaps this is not the most important quality, but it is worth something.

The problem is that a presidential candidate's "character" is the creation of PR and marketing specialists. If people actually knew George Bush's character (and, according to a poll cited in the above article, a whopping 44% think Bush is honest as of January; I didn't realize such a large percentage of the population was mentally challenged), he never would have come close enough to steal the 2000 election in the first place.

But speaking more generally, look at the types of people who are attracted to politics. Do any of them have the least bit of character? I think we've forgotten one of the fundamental premises of our form of government, as Glenn Greenwald has repeatedly pointed out. Power corrupts, politicians are not to be trusted. This is why we have check and balances, separation of powers and all that.

Now granted that some politicians are bigger crooks than others, but we should never just trust them, regardless of their party affiliation. Since the media has essentially forfeited its role as watchdog, and is selective about which facets of individual character it reveals, we should always be at least initially suspicious of the claims to good character that we hear from the candidates, or bad character from their opponents (recently, it came out that Obama was late in paying some parking tickets at Harvard--is this "character"?).

By what criteria should we judge our candidates? I'm inclined to say not his character, but whether I could have a beer with the guy is what really matters. But seriously, anyone who can honestly say "I voted for/against candidate X because s/he seems like a [insert trait here] person" has essentially abdicated their responsibility as a democratic citizen.

Numerous other qualities, like, say, oh, I don't know, what they plan on doing when elected are more responsible criteria for decision. In truth, though, the entire system of presidential elections almost ensures that no one can make a good decision about whom to vote for, and that that decision is in favor of the lesser of two evils.

In summary: character is a dumb way to decide who should be president, not because it doesn't matter, but because it's nigh impossible to discern who has the least awful character.

Two Aspects of the Left Blogosphere

2007-02-24T19:06:00.000-08:00

I've been reading liberal and progressive blogs regularly for a few years now; I even bought and read that Crashing the Gate book from Kos and that other guy (Armstrong, I believe). I've been pleased to see its increasing influence in politics and the political media. And of course, November 2006 brought the first enjoyable election day in all of my adult life.

Nevertheless, while I have jumped all over the place ideologically in the past decade, I have never really been entirely satisfied with the Democratic Party (I've never registered to vote as one, preferring either no affiliation or the Green Party) and what is taken to be liberalism in the US. For quite a while, I considered myself a species of Marxist, until I did some further study in 20th C. Marxism and came to reject the economic determinism that pervades most such accounts. To this day, even though my views are more complex, I would still call myself a leftist.

In any case, one thing I have come to notice is that, even though Democrat-friendly liberals and progressives dominate one hemisphere of the blogging world, there are Marxists, left libertarians, radical feminists, and others who are highly critical of the Democratic party. (I suppose this would be that radical (anti-)American left that we all hear about.) It goes without saying that they see Republicans as worse, but they don't see the Democrats as offering a substantive alternative.

I have come to read these blogs more and more, particularly these two (I've already mentioned Arthur Silber's work before, but this IOZ character is also a joy to read, even if he identifies as a libertarian). Perhaps I'm reading them more because Bush is starting to recede into the background, and I'm worried about what's coming next.

To simplify the situation, you might say there are two major factions in the Internet left, two distinct philosophies of how to effect change. On the one hand, you have what IOZ cleverly dubs "The Donkle", a mainstream, "work within the system" group that subordinates ideological consistency to the needs of a practical political movement.

On the other, there are what Joe Klein snidely refers to as the "illiberal left", those who are unwilling to "sell out" or water down their principles, who are just as eager (if not more so) to criticize Democrats as Republicans, and who reject American Empire, with minimal care as to which wing of the ruling class governs it.

A great example of the conflict of these approaches is an interchange between Steve Gilliard and Max Siwicky that I'm too lazy to link to right now (just check the archives of the News Blog if you're interested). Steve was arguing that his side is actual accomplishing positive things for people as Max and his ilk are busy having ideological discussions. (I don't quite recall Max's precise response to that point, but I will offer something in that vein below).

Now, as an individual enamored of ideas more than actions, I tend to side with the latter. Yet, I am still often torn, because I recognize that this alternative often practically amounts to invigorating and insightful discussions among intelligent people who have absolutely no power to change anything. I am not completely averse to compromise against my principles when it can lead to a palpable good.

This is probably why I vote Democratic. And yet, I see the Democrats, both politicians and voters, as suffering from a few major flaws they share with mainstream independents and Republicans. The easiest way to put it is as a kind of American exceptionalism (and again, Arthur Silber is the man to read for some excellent essays on this theme at "Once Upon a Time...").

If you look at American history since WWII, and even before (see US involvement in WWI, the Spanish-American War and the occupation of the Phillipines, the Mexican-American War, the genocide of the native population and the enslavement of another, etc.), you will see many horrific acts committed often unapologetically, even proudly, guided by this idea that America is a special force for Good in the world, so that it's fine to resort to all sorts of unsavory ends to achieve its ambitions.

Most of this past is ignored, probably because most Americans don't really care about history (or are fine with a watered-down, pro-American mythology). Even ostensibly well-educated and intelligent Democrats tend to view the actions of the latest administration as a unique monstrosity, a sudden abandonment of cherished American principles. Nevermind that, as Chomsky has demonstrated by carefully culling the historical record, every president since at least FDR has probably been guilty of war crimes as a result of covert and not-so-covert military operations (yes, even Carter).

I've said this before, and it's by no means an original insight, but here goes again. What distinguishes Bush from previous administrations is his administration's incompetence and lack of subtlety (isn't it ironic that an administration can be well-known for its secrecy?). They brazenly condone torture, indefinite extralegal detention, aggressive warfare, and a slew of other things which other administrations have kept on the DL.

Of course, I will acknowledge that this is a serious problem. If we openly condone and engage in these practices we have truly become monsters (although I will grant that there's also the possibility that by bringing them out into the open, they actually stand a chance of being changed--some variant of the heightening the contradictions argument). But let's not pretend that these are radical, totally unprecedented things.

I'd like to say more on this subject, but I've got too much other work to do. In closing, I'll say that while a continue to read excellent authors like Glenn Greenwald and Digby, I am less and less compelled by the Left Lite. If we were to seriously adopt a simple principle of consistency between evaluating the actions of our nation and those of others (what I deem to be the central point that the radical left-wing nut Chomsky argues), we would be having very different political conversations these days. Then I might be inclined to read more mainstream political sources.

Why the Medicalization of Everyday Life is Good

2007-01-28T00:08:00.000-08:00

(I've posted this at another journal of mine, but I'm reposting it here.)

It is a common claim that Americans take too many drugs, that we are society that is overmedicated. Conditions like attention deficit disorder and depression are said to be overdiagnosed and drugs like Prozac and Ritalin overprescribed. In short, so it is said, we make the mistake of taking ordinary differences in mental and physical abilities as genuine diseases to be treated medically, instead of problems of character that require more complex solutions.

Not only are all of these claims false, but I will argue the opposite: the medicalization of ordinary life is ultimately a positive development.

It never ceases to amaze me that, in a society that develops and benefits from so much of the technological progress of recent decades, opposition to future technologies runs at such a high level. From stem cell research to genetically modifed crops, Americans (as well as many Western Europeans) incessantly cry "it's unnatural!" and invoke the specters of Brave New World and Frankenstein. (Brave New World is perhaps my least favorite book for this very reason.)

This is not the case everywhere, particularly in Southeast Asia, where increasingly more of the breakthroughs in biotechnology are coming from. According to Ramez Naam, author of the superlative More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Human Enhancement, while a meager 20% of Americans advocate genetic engineering, 63% of Indians and an astounding 83% of Thais do. All the more reason why nations like China and India will overtake the West in the coming century (and why I may have to move to Asia).

What is interesting is that many Americans oppose augmenting human nature through genetic and cybernetic technologies, but have no issue with medical research to treat and cure diseases. The fact of the matter is, however, that research to treat a disease almost invariably can be used to enhance a normal condition.

Let me give but one example to illustrate. Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is commonly treated by the drugs Ritalin and Adderall. However, when "normal" indivduals take these drugs, their ability to pay attention and focus also improves.

Why is this? Part of it is the nature of the disease. Attention, like many human traits, is distibuted among the population along a normal distribution, or bell curve. Thus, most of the population falls near the average, with smaller percentages the further away in either direction.

ADHD, instead of being a condition with distinctive symptoms that one either has or does not (one example of this would be schizophrenia), is defined in a way that will include everyone below a certain point in that distribution. In other words, all it means to have ADHD is to be, say, in the bottom 20% (I'm not sure of the precise number) with regard to attention. This would be like saying that the dumbest fifth of the population suffers from "Intellect Deficit Disorder".

To extend the example of our hypothetical "Intellect Deficit Disorder", giving Ritalin only to those diagnosed with ADHD would be like giving a drug that increased intelligence only to those diagnosed with IDD. Such a thing would be absurd; if anyone could benefit from it, why shouldn't it be accessible to all? Many mental disorders, like depression and social anxiety, fall in the same category as ADHD.

Thus far, I have been giving an argument that would seem to oppose the point I'm trying to make. This is because I see "medicalization" as the means to fostering a wider acceptance of the use of medical treatments to improve human abilities. The more people who are diagnosed with these conditions, the more who take drugs, and the better off society is as a whole.

Why? Well consider what these drugs do. Prozac and other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs) can work on both the depressed and the healthy (although the effects are not quite the same for everybody) to increase their happiness. The happiness that comes from an SSRI is not the mindless contentedness of Huxley's idiotic "soma" but a kind of increased energy to get things done and a better resilience to the setbacks that everybody faces from day to day. Not only are the conditions for an individual improved, but our economic productivity as a society increases. (This doesn't necessarily entail an overworked population, the value of which is questionable, because if an individual finishes her work sooner, there's no reason why some of her increased productive energy couldn't be devoted to leisure pursuits, should she so choose.)

The major objection here, would be the negative side effects of drugs, for instance, Prozac's sexual side effects. However, as our understanding of biology improves, increasingly selective drugs are developed that produce fewer adverse side effects. There are more antidepressants on the market today that have fewer or no sexual effects; I'm on two myself and experience no discernible impediments.

Thus, I will be honest; I'm being a bit disingenuous with the title of this post. Medicalization in itself is not the good thing, but rather, the acceptance of technological enhancements to human functioning. Quite frankly, the objections to human enhancement are silly (in part because the distinction between pathology and normality is often completely arbitrary) and basically come down to two: one is that it is "unnatural", the other is that unintended side effects could produce negative, even fatal, results.

The first is merely a prejudice, which I won't bother taking the time to refute here (I've done it elsewhere); the second is largely mitigated by the extensive process of animal and human testing that precedes the approval of any treatment for public consumption. This may not answer every objection, but is sufficient for the purposes of this post.

In short, I ultimately think that it should be up to individuals to decide what treatments or enhancements they want for themselves, and in the case of children, families rather than governments should decide. For this reason, I oppose disastrous and wasteful policies like the so-called "War on Drugs", as well as the efforts of radical rightwing organizations to impede the release of drugs that fail to satisfy their rigid and narrow constraints of what is acceptable behavior for human beings.

And really, like I've said, should the US become even more of a society of Luddites and bioconservatives, we will be all the more quickly and easily surpassed by those who lack our prejudices. The development of these technologies ultimately cannot be stopped, and in the future, like all the progresses of humanity in the modern era, history shall recognize those who opposed them as the truly short-sighted ones.

...and then what?

2007-01-25T01:22:00.000-08:00

(I really should be getting onto other things, but I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about something interesting from yesterday.)

The Doomsday Clock was recently moved forward 2 minutes to 11:55. Most people probably don't pay much heed to it--of those who are even aware of its existence, it's probably just to keep their sanity.

In some ways, it's amazing that human civilization has continued since the discovery of nuclear weapons and their mass proliferation. Now, we face other threats like global warming and the depletion of fossil fuels which will likely only make things worse.

I suspect global warming in itself would not be sufficient to wipe out human civilization, but insofar as it will be a spur to other problems--famines, mass migrations, wars over resources, etc.--it will create a more unstable world in which nuclear warfare becomes more probable. Other new weapons technologies pose additional dangers.

In any case, I think it's only a matter of time before humanity either destroys itself or descends into a new Dark Ages. We can only hope this doesn't happen during our lifetime.

I've been fortunate this semester to sit in on a class entitled "Boundaries of the Human in the Age of Robots and Clones," dealing with the implications of future technologies, especially human enhancement and robotics. I've written on such topics before--anyone who knows me is well aware that this is an interest of mine, even if they don't take it seriously.

The other day, the professor leading the class mentioned a roboticist at the university here with whom he has conversed before. When meeting with a previous version of this class, the roboticist was asked what inspires him to do the work that he does. He began by making a statement similar to that I opened this entry with, namely that he's pessimistic about the future of humankind, and thought it a huge shame especially because of the likely scarcity of intelligent life in the universe.

Right now, some roboticists have taken a lesson from biology and are designing robots from the bottom up, creating simpler robots and gradually making them more complex (top-down design has produced very limited results). Right now, we may have robots about as smart as insects. The roboticist's hope is that his life's work will move this along, perhaps producing robots as complex as some simple mammal. Future roboticists, given enough time, may produce something like Commander Data from Star Trek, or perhaps yet greater things.

In short, he sees himself as helping to design a successor species to humanity, one that may survive our destruction and perpetuate the existence of intelligent life, perhaps eventually spreading itself to other parts of the universe. His motives are no different than those of the blue collar worker who spends his life working hard so that his children might go to college and do better than he.

Personally, I have little interest in children--also something I've written about. This is why I'm more interested in human biological (and cybernetic) enhancement, including things like increasing our lifespan. Perhaps it's selfish, but I want to be among those modifying themselves and becoming a part of "post-humanity".

"Human nature" may not be concrete or easily ascertainable, but I think history shows that people never learn from history (perhaps Western Europe's rejection of warring amongst itself is an exception, but such examples are few and far between). We are messing with powers far beyond our understanding or ability to control.

Thus, as I see it, our only hope is to change human nature itself, so that we might be more capable of handling this problems. Wisdom may not be encoded in our genes, but there is certainly a large genetic component to traits like intelligence and empathy. Yes, research into human enhancement (genetic or otherwise) might only exacerbate our current problems, but I don't see any other choice.

Perhaps it's perverse, but this is the only reason for hope I've been able to discover in a world that stands but 5 minutes from destruction.

Leiter on Vanderbilt

2007-01-15T00:49:00.000-08:00

I will not comment on this in detail, because I am leaving a public record, and it would be inexpedient to say what I really feel. Nevertheless, some of you will probably find this NYT article on Leiter's Gourmet Report along with Leiter's response, rather interesting.

Here is an excerpt from the latter:

...[W]hat is more appalling is the nonsense about Penn State, Stony Brook, and Vanderbilt. First of all, they don't have good departments, they have weak departments overall (with honorable exceptions etc. etc. etc.), whether you're interested in philosophy of language or ancient philosophy or Continental philosophy. Second, it is simply false that "they do not participate in the ratings." Each of them have been included in the ratings, and each time they fared quite poorly overall, even if they each have some areas of strength.

But most breathtaking is John Stuhr's idiotic comment that Rutgers "doesn't emphasize what we do," where "we" means Vanderbilt. It is true that Rutgers doesn't much emphasize history of philosophy or Continental philosophy (that's why NYU is #1, and Rutgers #2), but how could that explain why Vanderbilt has never been close to the top 50 and barely rates in any historical areas? The difference between Rutgers and Vanderbilt isn't "emphasis": it's that Vanderbilt has a weak faculty, even in most of the areas it purports to "emphasize" like post-Kantian Continental philosophy. (Rutgers, by the way, is obviously much stronger in the history of ancient and early modern philosophy than Vanderbilt; only in American pragmatism does Vanderbilt have an edge.) One would need only ask the dozens of philosophers specializing in those areas who completed the PGR surveys, after all.

Leiter is good enough to malign both my alma mater and my current institution. I must say, though, had I not gone to a school like Penn State, I probably would have never gotten into philosophy. Analytic philosophers have a distinct talent for sapping the life out of even the most exciting topics (see, e.g., an anthology on the Philosophy of Sex that I used a year and a half ago).

Of course, it's unfair to impugn the group as a whole. There are quite a few distinctly analytic philosophers doing interesting work today, not to mention the fact that good historians of philosophy--the ones who read original texts closely and charitably and who know the relevant historical background well enough to avoid anachronistic interpretations--can just as easily come from either "branch" of contemporary philosophy.

I could say more, but I will stop myself before I say anything potentially incriminating.

The Virtue of Cowardice

2006-12-23T22:39:00.000-08:00

I have long accepted the fact that I am a coward. I would never consider dying or killing for my country, or for any purported noble cause. Yet, I have never been ashamed of that. I have never really seen the value in sacrificing for such things. However, I have also never been able to adequately articulate this vision, and was literally accused of moral weakness once when I tried to defend it.

Thus, when I watched The Americanization of Emily, a film which I was led to by the fascinating blogger Arthur Silber, it instantly became one of my favorites by doing something I could not. This movie launches an unrelenting shock and awe campaign on the futility of warfare and the idiocy of heroism, as Silber compellingly argues here (see also here and here).

I strongly encourage you to read at least the first of Silber's essays, although it may be better to do so after watching the film. If you at all trust my opinion on these matters, watch this movie. It is brilliant, absolutely marvelous, and incredible considering the time it was produced, in 1964, not even a decade after the "noble" war which serves as its setting. It is likely unlike any war film you have ever seen.

(Incidentally, those of you familiar with James' essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" might find it an apt accompaniment. I'm considering showing this film to my class in the spring along with James' essay.)

I offer this one tidbit to stoke your interest, and to give you a sense of why cowardice should be nothing to be afraid of:

War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he's capable of ... it’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons: for liberation or manifest destiny. Always against tyranny and always in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us – it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice, we shall all be saved.

Speaking of Non-belief...

2006-12-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

This is quite fascinating and, in my view, a good sign (h/t Digby):

Multinational surveys have often reported that Americans are much more likely to believe in God than people in most other developed countries, particularly in Europe. However, a new Harris Poll finds that 42 percent of all U.S. adults say they are not "absolutely certain" there is a God, including 15 percent who are "somewhat certain," 11 percent who think there is probably no God and 16 percent who are not sure.

These are the results of a Harris Poll conducted online by Harris Interactive® between October 4 and 10, 2006 with a nationwide sample of 2,010 U.S. adults.

Important difference between online surveys and surveys conducted by telephone interviewers

Over the last few years, several different surveys have found that more people admit to potentially embarrassing beliefs or behaviors when answering online surveys (without interviewers) than admit to these behaviors when talking to interviewers in telephone surveys. They are also three times more likely to say that their sexual orientation is gay, lesbian or bi-sexual. Researchers call this unwillingness to give honest answers to some questions in telephone surveys a "social desirability bias."

It is therefore no surprise that in this online survey, more people say they are not absolutely certain there is a God than have given similar replies in other surveys conducted by telephone.

...

Are believers declining?

Three years ago, in an identical survey, 79 percent of adults said they believed in God and 66 percent said they were absolutely certain that there is a God. In this new survey, those numbers have declined to 73 percent and 58 percent respectively.

I've studied this issue a bit myself, and the numbers I've seen for belief in God have always been in the 80s or even 90s for the US. I wonder how much of this disparity has to do with the whole "social desirability bias" and how much with actual declining belief. (Or, how much is error in this particular poll? For instance, internet access tends to be less evenly distributed in this country than telephones, so this could bias the sample towards those who are better educated and better off financially.)

That more than a quarter do not believe (11% believing there is no God, 16% unsure) makes me pleased.

But why? Why does it please me that belief in God is declining? (I ask this question to myself, as much as anyone else who might wonder at my motivations.)

Well, one reason would not be specific to me: we like people to believe as we do, especially when we are confident about something.

But honestly, there's a lot of evidence that people who are religious believers are happier than those who are not. Jonathan Haidt suggests that this is a result of feeling connected to something larger than the self, whether it be a religious community or something metaphysical (or both).

He may be right. Beliefs aside, there are few secular organizations that are as tightly knit as (many) religious communities are.

In any case, given that at least some of this happiness is attributable to beliefs, in a sense I am pleased about something that results in less happiness in the world.

Peter Singer was on The Colbert Report last night, and it got me thinking about problems with utilitarianism (a view for which I have a lot of sympathy). The thing that I don't like about utilitarianism is that it puts all moral worth on something passive, something that is undergone rather than done, viz. suffering.

Yes, they claim to be concerned with happiness, but as pleasure, not as something active like eudaimonia or laetitia (joy) in Spinoza's sense. In any case, all people like Singer ever talk about is suffering anyway.

Returning to the issue at hand, I'm inclined to think that belief is not a matter of choice (contrary to the popular interpretation of James' "Will to Believe"). On some issues one does have options but, for most issues most of the time, things just seem true or false to most people.

I'll grant that wishful thinking plays a large role in determining belief--so that people believe what they want to believe--but this seldom operates consciously. In any case, even if they believe what they want and even if they recognize this to some extent, they still don't have much control over what they want in the first place. (They are aware of their desires but never even dream of the causes of those desires, etc.)

I think the challenge for modern human beings is to find happiness in a world in which we realize that we are unquestionably finite. We are not the center of the universe, there is not some higher power watching over us, we have no eternal aspects to ourselves; we are animals as much as any other species.

This doesn't mean happiness is impossible. We have to realize that this is not an all or nothing game. Yes, it would be nice to live longer than we do (although I don't know that I'd go so far as to say forever), but given our limitations, we can still make the most of things.

This may be a diminished happiness, but at least it's one that doesn't depend on questionable beliefs that will be doubtful for any honest, intelligent person. (OK, that's an unfair jab at believers. I think they can be honest and intelligent in their own ways.)

Anyway, it's nice to know I'm not the only one ineligible for public office in this state.

Fun Fact

2006-12-10T22:23:00.000-08:00

I'm not allowed to hold public office in Tennessee!

Article IX, Section 2 of the state's constitution reads (h/t Incongruous):

"No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state."

Apparently my home state, Pennsylvania, is among six other states with a similar clause (in its case, Article 1, Section 4), although technically it just implies that it is not the case that atheists are not disqualified:

"No person who acknowledges the being of a God and a future state of rewards and punishments shall, on account of his religious sentiments, be disqualified to hold any office or place of trust or profit under this Commonwealth."

Isn't that fun? More reason why I have no intention of ever living in Tennessee or Pennsylvania again!

Iraq

2006-11-30T12:34:00.000-08:00

As the civil war rages on, my mind turns more and more to thoughts of Iraq. Of late, I've taken more of an interest in educating myself about the conflict.

I pride myself on having opposed the invasion and occupation from the beginning, not from some sense of political expediency, but for moral reasons. As is well known by any student of history or veteran of combat--and of course the Bush administration has a dearth of both--war is hell and should be avoided when at all possible. Death, destruction, and suffering on a massive scale are all but guaranteed in war; if we resort to it, we'd better do so for a damn good reason and in a way that minimizes its negative results.

Two recent articles, one from the NY Review of Books and the other from the Boston Review, are excellent resources for understanding the current situation and its development. They complement each other quite nicely, since the former shows the massive ineptitude in managing the occupation from the US side, while the latter is an excellent account of what Iraqis have experienced in the transition from standing united against the American occupation to pandemic sectarian strife.

Both are quite long, but well worth the time spent. It's sad that there's so little that we as individuals can do to end this thing; it seems like the only person who has the power to do so (at least in terms of US involvement) wouldn't change his mind even if Jesus Christ himself descended from the heavens and slapped him upside the head.

Nevertheless, one thing we can do as citizens is inform ourselves and try to learn how we got into this mess. This is especially important since a number of those still in power want to go for the threepeat of failed US interventions in the middle east by targeting Iran. We must do everything in our power to prevent such recklessness--what better way to start than through knowledge?