On the causal completeness of physics

by Massimo Pigliucci

As readers of this blog know, I am not sympathetic to extreme reductionism, and reject both it and determinism in favor of a robust concept of emergence. Of course, I think a moderate epistemic reductionism has been the winning approach for science, and I agree that there is plenty of room for some degree of ontological reductionism (i.e., some times the whole is just the sum of its parts). But I’m not a fan of the everything-is-an-illusion-because-of-reductionism school of thought that seems so popular among skeptics and some scientists these days (see, for instance, my take on Alex Rosenberg’s particularly sharp articulation of that position).

Now, during my participation in the recent workshop on philosophical naturalism organized by Sean Carroll, I had an interesting exchange with physicist Steven Weinberg, who played what he thought was a trump card in favor of reductionism “all the way down”: he mentioned the causal completeness of the laws of physics. I asked him to elaborate on the point, and he said that the laws of Newtonian mechanics, for instance, are causally complete in the sense that there is no room within the equations for any unaccounted parameters. It follows, according to Weinberg, that those equations are a complete description of the causality of the system, leaving no room for emergent properties.

Okay, so the prima facie objection here is that Newtonian mechanics is known to be wrong, so it’s a bad example to make a case for extreme reductionism. Second, mathematically, Newtonian mechanics can be derived as an approximation of relativity theory, which means that — as it turns out — there were some parameters missing from Newton’s equations after all. Third, one can immediately raise serious philosophical issues concerned with the very meaning of “causality” being deployed here, and which specific form of theoretical reductionism Weinberg thought he was defending. But I figured that the guy knew what he was talking about (after all, I’m not the one holding a Nobel in physics!), so I took note and postponed further thinking on the issue until I had time to look into the primary literature on causal completeness. Now I have, and it turns out that things are more complicated, and interesting!

In this post I’ll comment in some depth on a paper by Agustín Vicente published in International Studies  in the Philosophy of Science (2006).

To set the frame for the discussion I cannot do better than to quote Vicente’s abstract verbatim: “According to an increasing number of authors, the best, if not the only, argument in favor of physicalism is the so-called ‘overdetermination argument’. This argument, if sound, establishes that all the entities that enter into causal interactions with the physical world are physical. One key premise in the overdetermination argument is the principle of the causal closure of the physical world, said to be supported by contemporary physics.”

In turn, the overdetermination argument goes like this (again, from Vicente), where “dubious” events are events that are alleged to be non-physical (such as mental causation, supernatural interventions, and the like):

(i) The principle of the causal closure of the physical (CCP): every physical effect (i.e., caused event) has physical sufficient causes;

(ii)  Causal efficacy of the “dubious”: dubious events cause changes in the physical world;

(iii)  No overdetermination: there is no dubious/physical causal overdetermination.

And the conclusion is that:

(iv) Dubious events are physical events.

As stated, I have no trouble with either the CCP or the overdetermination argument. I am a physicalist* [1], after all. But notice that the CCP as stated by Vicente bears only a family resemblance with what Weinberg invoked in our discussion. The CCP doesn’t state anything like that the laws of physics as we understand them now are causally complete. It simply states that, again, every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause. As such, the CCP excludes mental dualism (in philosophy of mind), vitalism (in biology) and supernaturalism (everywhere), but does not exclude emergent properties, as long as these are conceived as qualitatively new physical properties that manifest themselves under certain conditions of complexity and organization of matter. Another way to put this is that the CCP leads to physicalism, but physicalism does not logically entail extreme reductionism.

But why should we construe an argument like the one above in defense of physicalism to begin with? Vicente gives an interesting answer right at the onset of his paper. He says that it used to be thought that physicalism was a reasonable inductive inference arising from an historical trend of unification among all the sciences. That is, an epistemological argument could be made that, just like chemistry eventually reduced to physics (something about which not everyone agrees, actually), so eventually biology would be reduced to chemistry, and the social sciences would fold into biology. Et voilà le jeux sont faits, so to speak. Not so fast, as it turns out. There is an increasing agreement among philosophers (and, indeed, even Weinberg assented when I mentioned it!) that the actual history of science is taking a different trajectory, with the special sciences becoming more, not less, independent of physics, each operating at its own level(s) of complexity and explanation, with no hope of a true “theory of everything” coming along, ever.

That being the case, then, supporters of physicalism have to come up with an ontological account instead (which, again, is precisely what Weinberg tried at the naturalism workshop). This would be a theory that argues that while epistemic reductionism is practically impossible, ontologically speaking, it’s quarks (or strings, or whatever) all the way down. Which further implies that whatever laws describe the behavior of quarks (or strings, or whatever), they are the only laws of the land (and by land, I mean the universe), everything else is ontologically superfluous. Hence, the overdetermination argument above, which uses the CCP.

I could quit here and declare victory over Weinberg: the CCP that he invoked does not do the work that he thinks it does (specifically, eliminating the possibility of emergent properties), although it does do the job we both want it to do (eliminate dualism, vitalism and supernaturalism). But no, I just had to go on and read the rest of Vicente’s paper, didn’t I?

The question he goes on to address is an obvious one: why should we believe in the causal closure principle, particularly since it most certainly isn’t a law of physics? There are two classes of reasons: we could think of the CCP as a methodological principle guiding physicists (and, really, naturalists of all sorts, particularly skeptics) in their actual practice. Think of it as the Scooby-Doo principle: whenever you think there is a “dubious” (i.e., paranormal, extranormal, supernatural) effect at play, by the end of the episode it will turn out that it was just plain old physics (or biology, or whatever other science ends up offering the solution to the mystery). Alternatively, we could say that while the CCP is not strictly a law of physics, it is somehow supported by the laws of physics, and that’s a hell of a support!

By the end of the paper Vicente concludes that both lines of inquiry are fruitful. On the one hand, there are good inductive reasons to think that causal completeness is a valuable methodological precept. On the other hand, the principle can be connected to the laws of physics, and specifically to the laws of conservation. The arguments Vicente makes in the bulk of his paper are complex, and he does an admirable job at pointing out the difficulties of each. I will simply mention some of the highlights, to give you a flavor of what I think is a truly interesting and well written philosophical paper (one that Weinberg would do well to read, before talking about causal closure again, in my modest opinion. Ok, ok, that opinion wasn’t really that modest...).

One of the interesting notions emerging from Vicente’s historical analysis of the CCP is that it has not always been held during the history of science. Something like the CCP was entailed by atomistic-Epicurean physics, and then much later on by Leibnizian dynamics, but not at all times in between. Still, contemporary physics certainly does accept the closure principle as a strong methodological precept.

Vicente gets himself into what I think is unnecessary trouble, however, when he discusses emergentism. Here is what he says, verbatim (p. 153 of the article): “Emergentists would agree that physics is the science of the bottom level; nonetheless, they would claim that it cannot explain everything that happens in its domain, for some causal powers ‘emerge’ and bring about changes in the physical world that physics cannot explain. ... Some authors, such as Cartwright and Dupré, deny that physics is basic in the sense used here, that is, that it explains and describes the bottom level that somehow fixes or determines the rest of the facts of the world.”

But none of that seems to me in contradiction with the closure principle, as long as we understand emergent properties as physical properties, described by physical (or biological, or even social) laws or law-like generalizations. Remember, the CCP simply says that every physical effect has physical sufficient causes. To go further and somehow construe emergent properties as problematic for the CCP (or, as Weinberg would have it, the other way around) is a non sequitur. For instance, the best studied emergent properties are those pertinent to phase transitions (from solid to liquid, liquid to gas, etc.). But even if it turned out that the theory of phase transitions is irreducible to lower-level physical theories (because of the appearance of truly qualitatively new physical phenomena) we would still be talking about physical processes. Nobody is invoking a type of solid-liquid dualism, and certainly no one has suggested that the transition between liquid water and water vapor is the result of supernatural intervention!

Back to the main track. Vicente at one point (p. 154, if you are reading along) concludes that there is no good a priori justification of the closure principle, for three reasons: “(i) it cannot be justified by assuming reductivism, (ii) it does not follow from the fact that physics is a basic science (emergentists assume this, but they deny that it is explanatorily comprehensive), and (iii) it is possible to argue that physics is not basic.” He then goes on to explore the possibility that the CCP might be justifiable a posteriori, by induction.

Here again, the verdict is mixed. On the one hand — and despite the above mentioned discontinuous appearance of the closure principle in science throughout its history — it simply cannot be denied that the CCP has worked very nicely for physics: whenever physicists have looked for a physical explanation of a phenomenon, they found it. (Or, as Tim Minchin observed in a different context: “Throughout history every mystery ever solved has turned out to be, Not Magic.”) But theoretical biologists like Stuart Kauffman have also long pointed out that physico-chemistry has not at all been quite as successful at explaining biological phenomena. Kauffman and others (myself included) impute this failure to — you guessed it! — emergent properties arising from the interactions of complex systems of molecules, cells and even whole organisms. But once again I just don’t see why Vicente seems to think this is somehow a problem for the CCP understood as he presents it at the beginning of the paper. Kauffman and colleagues are most certainly not arguing for vitalistic forces, and much less for supernatural ones. But perhaps I am missing something fundamental here.

Finally, we get to the possible connection between the closure principle and physical laws as we understand them. According to Vicente there are two prominent venues of inquiry here: causal closure may be related to the action of forces in physics, or it may be connected to the idea of quantity conservation (such as the conservation of energy, or of momentum). Let’s take a quick look at both.

First off, notice that the discussion at this point is about what constitutes a cause (we are talking about the causal closure principle, after all!), a notoriously treacherous territory in philosophy, as much as it is often blissfully ignored by scientists.

Be that as it may, one basic idea (developed originally by David Papineau) is that physics has been able to expand its explanatory domain by invoking a smaller and smaller number of forces (currently, three: electroweak, strong, and gravitational). Ergo, there is no reason to think that in the future we are going to need more forces to augment our explanatory power (indeed, there are reasons to believe we’ll need fewer: that’s what the so-called “theory of everything” which physicists have been after for a while is supposed to do, to unify all the remaining forces in physics by way of a unitary account).

To make a somewhat long (but fascinating) story short, here is how Vicente summarizes the situation for the CCP in terms of its connection to forces in physics:

(i) Physical effects are, or involve, variations in the quantity of (the universally conserved) energy possessed by an object (body or whatever); 
(ii) The causation of physical effects consists in the action of forces; 
(iii) There is inductive evidence, partly negative, for the view that such forces are physical forces. 

Considering (i), Vicente points out that, in principle, the CCP could be questioned on the ground that not all physical effects involve a variation in the quantity of energy. Admittedly, though, it is hard to imagine which physical effects would fall within this unusual category.

Skipping for a moment to (iii), it can be questioned, in principle, by dualism, vitalism and emergentism, on the ground that its conclusion is inductive (and therefore tentative). As I said repeatedly above, however, I can’t figure out why Vicente thinks that emergentism is in the same category as the first two. All emergentism says is that some forces (or phenomena, more broadly) are not fundamental, that they only manifest themselves at certain levels of organized complexity. But these forces or phenomena would still be physical.

We are then left with (ii), the logical link to forces. Vicente doesn’t seem to like the invocation of forces to buttress the CCP, on at least two grounds: first, talk of forces actually smells a bit too much of classical mechanics, which has been replaced by a more sophisticated physics, to the point that physicists themselves may one day abandon any talk of force whatsoever, re-conceiving the whole shebang in terms, say, of fields and associate particles (Higgs!). He also claims that forces actually already play a secondary role in physics, with the main stage being occupied by conserved properties anyway.

Which is exactly where we turn at the end of this tour de force. The basic idea here is that causation is just the transfer of a conserved quantity; indeed, forces — in this conception — are not causes at all. Note that not all physical quantities can be transmitted (velocity, for instance, cannot). But if they can’t, then they don’t have causal powers (if you are thinking that a fast car hitting you does have causal power, you have to remember that the force of the impact is due to a transfer of another quantity, kinetic energy, not to the transfer of velocity).

While there is a certain intellectual and aesthetic appeal to defining causes simply as transferences of conserved quantities, so-called “CQ” theories of causality are just as controversial as theories of causality based on forces (I told you, causality is a mess!). I will leave it to the reader to work through the last part of Vicente’s paper to appreciate the nature of the controversy, but before closing I need to note that Vicente does admit that it is not possible to deductively exclude the existence of unknown forces, or of unknown quantities that can be transferred and are overall conserved. This is really not a particularly strong objection to either force/CQ accounts of causality or to the CCP itself. But it does mean that we arrive at the rejection of, say, new forces responsible for astrological effects (one of Carl Sagan’s favorite arguments against astrology) only inductively, and therefore in a potentially fallible manner. Not that any physicist or physicalist ought to be losing sleep over such matters, of course.

——

[1] The * after physicalism in my case is because I actually believe in an entirely natural ontology, but not necessarily an entirely physical one. For instance, I am attracted to mathematical Platonism. But of course mathematical objects (say, numbers) don’t violate the CCP because they do not have, per se, any physical effects.

Rationally Speaking podcast: Ben Goldacre on Bad Pharma

"Medicine is broken," warns Ben Goldacre, the British physician, academic, author of the Guardian's Bad Science column.

In this live episode of Rationally Speaking, Massimo and Julia interview Ben about his new book, Bad Pharma, and how the evidence about pharmaceutical drugs gets distorted due to shoddy regulations, missing data, and the influence of drug companies.

About the book: We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.

All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct on a global scale affects us.

With Goldacre’s characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharma reveals a shockingly broken system and calls for something to be done. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.

Botanizing Probability

by Ian Pollock

A bearded stranger approaches you on the street and starts pulling objects out of a sack. The first three objects he pulls out are (1) a large tube of toothpaste, (2) a live jellyfish, (3) a small tube of toothpaste. Now, what is your level of credence that the next object pulled out of the bag is a tube of toothpaste? How much are you willing to bet on toothpaste, and at what odds?

This is how Adam Elga begins his excellent paper, subjective probabilities should be sharp, and it seems a fitting introduction to an odd little problem in philosophy of probability. [1] What are we to make of a situation like the above?

As Elga argues in his paper, we might start by trying to make a distinction between three relevant situations in which a probability judgment is requested of us. The evidence can be, in his words, sharp (for example, the probability that it will be 20°C or higher in Winnipeg on March 15, for which a farmer’s almanac or weather forecast should be just fine), or sparse but with a clear upshot (for example, the probability that the next person in the UK to be named Suzanne will be born at an odd hour of the day — we have no idea when this birth will take place, but 50% is the way to bet).

But sometimes, as in  the above example of the jellyfish/toothpaste draw, evidence is sparse and unspecific. Assigning a probability to toothpaste would require theorizing about the stranger’s motives as well as the bag’s contents. But both are utterly mysterious to us. There is a temptation here to refuse to make a probability judgment, or to say that the probability is “vague” or “in some interval.” Elga’s paper goes on to argue that this last proposal is not really acceptable (it ends up implying that you should reject a Dutch book — a sequence of bets guaranteed to make you money no matter what the outcome).

This is only the most extreme example of the strange effects of “vagueness” on probability judgments. In a classic paper, Daniel Ellsberg goes over some other situations, such as the following:

Urn A contains exactly 50 red balls and 50 black balls.
Urn B contains 100 red or black balls, but you don’t know the relative quantities. It might be 50-50, 0 red and 100 black, 100 red and 0 black, or anything in between.
You are offered two tickets. Ticket A pays $100 if a red is drawn from Urn A. Ticket B pays $100 if a red is drawn from Urn B. Which would you be willing to pay the most for?

This is one instantiation of the Ellsberg paradox. A moment’s thought should show that your probability on drawing red should be 50% (1:1 odds) in both cases. But we see that there is an intuitive tendency to prefer the wager in which the “dynamics” of the problem are known (Ticket A).

But wait! Suppose we keep everything the same, but Tickets A and B pay out if a black ball is drawn. Symmetrically, Ticket A would still be preferred to Ticket B, since Ticket A is less “vague.” But then your inferred probability for “red from Urn B” must be less than “red from Urn A,” while at the same time, “black from Urn B” is less than “black from Urn A.” Since the probabilities from Urn A must sum to 100%, this means your probabilities from Urn B are summing to less than 100%. This earns you a special place in the 3rd circle of Bayes Hell.

So this preference for “non-vague” bets leads to absurdities if we attempt to interpret your betting behavior as probability. This is a problem, because many philosophers, most notably Frank Ramsey, have wanted to enshrine “whatever determines betting preferences” as a sort of operational, extensive definition of probability.

My question is fairly broad: how can we make sense of what is going on in cases like these?

Let’s start with the Ellsberg paradox, as it seems like a more tractable case.

First, I will declare an interest: I do not share the intuition that prefers the known urn to the unknown one — I am completely indifferent between the two bets. That being said, I have a few ideas about why some people might prefer the bet in which the urn contents are known. Ranked in order of plausibility (although they are not mutually exclusive), they are:

1. You would feel stupid if you chose Ticket B (the unknown urn) and it turned out that there were only black balls in Urn B. You have a strong preference not to feel stupid, so you’re willing to pay more for Urn A, which is guaranteed to be a “fair” urn. [2]
2. You have been conditioned to think of a probability as a property of a situation, rather than a property of an epistemic state. (This is encouraged by our conventions of language, as in “the probability of rain tomorrow is 20%,” which uses the definite article “the” and thus implies a single uniquely correct value of probability, independent of what anybody knows about it. I prefer to phrase these things as “I give odds of 4:1 against rain tomorrow.”) For this reason, you feel that you do not know the probabilities for Urn B, and so you do not wish to bet on it.
3. You are wary of being tricked by whoever is holding the draw into betting on a lame horse. An urn with unknown quantities of red and black seems like a potential trick.

If I am right, then in my opinion only one of these objections is defensible (number 3). But they do seem to me to do a half-decent job of explaining away this intuition.

But what about the toothpaste/jellyfish draw? Here, I do share the feeling that says there may be no uniquely correct way to proceed. However, I think I may be able to demystify where that intuition is coming from, and what we should make of it. Give it the old college try, anyway.

For me, the interesting thing about the toothpaste/jellyfish draw is that my thought process when I consider it is very unstable. My stream of consciousness looks something like this:

“Okay Ian, two toothpaste tubes and one jellyfish. What do we expect next?”
“I don’t know. How long is a piece of string?”
“What about Laplace’s rule of succession? (s+1)/(n+2). Defining success as toothpaste and non-success as non-toothpaste, we get (2+1)/(3+2)=3/5 probability of toothpaste.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure that that is even applic - SQUIRREL!”
“Pay attention! How much would you be willing to pay for a ticket that paid out $10 if toothpaste was drawn?”
“I dunno, maybe I’d give $2.”
“Okay, so that implies your odds are 4:1 against toothpaste.”
“I think that reflects the triumph of curiosity over thrift, more than it does any real probability judgment. I would not pay $200 for a $1000 ticket. Or maybe I would.”
“Look, just answer this: how likely is toothpaste? You can see that 2 out of 3 things pulled out of the bag have been toothpaste. That is evidence that toothpaste is common in the bag.”
“If you say so. Do we even know that this is a random draw? Maybe the guy draws whatever he wants to, and that depends on how I bet. Why is he even performing this draw? He’s probably trying to trick me.”
“Trick you into betting for toothpaste, or against toothpaste? By the way, what’s wrong with the Laplace’s rule approach, again?”
“I don’t know. Please go boil your head.”

Clearly, if one’s probability judgments are jumping all over the place from second to second and minute to minute, the smart thing to do is to refuse to either quote them or act upon them until they settle into a stable range (if they do so at all). It’s not that our probabilities are “vague” or “unsharp” in this situation. It’s that we are unable to assign them at all due to our severe epistemic limitations. “Vague” describes the phenomenology of such a situation (we feel a sense of confusion about how to proceed), rather than the actual answer one should give.

I think I can get even more specific on this. Consider that there are two types of uncertainty we encounter in our lives: empirical uncertainty, and logical uncertainty. Empirical uncertainty is not knowing who won the Superbowl. Logical uncertainty is not knowing the cube root of 74,088.

The important thing to notice about logical uncertainty is that it is relative to our abilities to draw deductions from knowledge in a timely way, rather than relative to our knowledge itself. The most brilliant mind ever to have lived can sit in an armchair all day, and not be able to tell you who won the Superbowl. But they ought to be able to tell you the cube root of 74,088, given enough time. In fact, I should be able to as well. The cube root of 74,088 is *implied knowledge*, like most of mathematics and some of philosophy. In a sense, you already know it, because you know other things which logically entail it.

What’s the probability that the cube root of 74,088 is greater than 35? This is a strange question precisely because there is no empirical uncertainty about the answer at all. But probabilistic reasoning only works well with empirical uncertainty, not logical uncertainty. Actually, correct use of Bayes rule in a sense assumes “logical omniscience,” wherein you are perfectly able to comprehend the logical implications of all hypotheses under consideration.

Thus, my tentative resolution of the jellyfish/toothpaste paradox is that its paradoxical nature appears because we are not logically omniscient, and the situation into which the thought experiment places us is both empirically and logically intractable. It is as though our inner calculator had a stack overflow. We are used to probability judgments under empirical uncertainty but logical certainty — for example, the chance of getting tails on a coin flip. The introduction of severe logical uncertainty makes us reluctant to try to calculate any probabilities at all (we just don’t know where to start analyzing the situation) — hence the intuitive appeal of an evasive answer to the jellyfish/toothpaste draw.

Does this seem satisfying to you?

_________

[1] I first heard about this problem, however, from the Phi2Phi app.

[2] E.T. Jaynes tells the story of an objection to the US draft lottery; according to the plaintiff, the drawing was not “truly random” because the bowl containing names had not been sufficiently mixed. Asks Jaynes, “To whom is it unfair?”

Information doesn’t want to be free

by Massimo Pigliucci

It is more and more common these days to hear phrases like “information wants to be free.” I will go for the charitable interpretation and assume that people don’t mean that information actually has wants and desires, like a conscious creature. [If anyone truly thinks something like that, they may want to join the local chapter of the Cuckoo Club and certainly not read the rest of this post.]

What I take people to mean by that strange phrase is something more along the lines that in the era of the internet people have a right to completely free information. This is the sentiment that floated around most recently after the tragic death of Aaron Swartz, who was viciously prosecuted by an overzealous Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office for having downloaded academic papers from a pay site (which didn’t actually press charges) and threatened to distribute them free over the net (which he didn’t). [1] A broader version of the same discussion has been going on for years with regard to illegal downloads of music, movies and books.

I have very little sympathy for the music, video and publishing industries as such: indeed, with large industries of any kind. Which means that I am very much in favor of multiplying distribution channels, encouraging the flourishing of small publishers, and even preferring direct marketing by artists and authors.

But I truly don’t understand the idea that with the advent of the internet “information,” meaning pretty much everything that is not a material good, ought to be available for free. Why?

An important component of that idea is that things are different now with the internet, considered a special case when compared to any other means of distribution of information. But, again, why should this be so? The intuition seems to be that physical cd’s, dvd’s and books cost money to be produced, while everyone can copy any e-version of the same products quickly and at virtually no cost (you still have to pay for storage space and electricity to run the computers though). But this is quite naive. There remain plenty of significant costs to produce, say, an e-book. Let me walk you through the process as I experienced it first hand, with my latest book, Answers for Aristotle.

To begin with, of course, the author (me, in this case) has to have the idea and set aside countless hours to develop it. If time is money, and unless you are independently wealthy, there is cost #1.

If you wish to put out said book with a general (as opposed to an academic) publisher you will need a professional agent. Cost #2. (This one, of course, doesn’t apply for academic books, but everything else does.)

Once you get a contract and finish the book, the publishing house will give it to an editor to look over for style and content. Cost #3.

Assuming everything goes hunky-dory, the book goes into production, which means someone has to pay a copy editor and an index preparer. Costs #4 and #5.

Before the book can actually get published it will need a nice looking cover (cost #6) and a  preliminary publicity campaign (#7).

Finally, nobody will read the book unless it is properly distributed, which even online is still costly (just inquire with Amazon, #8), though I suppose we could eventually move to reduce (but not eliminate!) that cost if the publishers themselves begin to sell e-books through their web sites. (But then there is the very pressing problem that potential readers are far less likely to visit hundreds or thousands of sites rather than aggregators like Amazon or Smashwords.)

At the end of all this you have the nerve to get on a soap box and demand that my book (or music, or film) should be available for free? On what grounds, pray? Why shouldn’t my distributor, my publicist, my copy editor, my editor, and — frankly — I, not get paid for the work we’ve done?

It should be clear to readers of this blog, or listeners of my podcast, that I do make quite a bit of my work available for free. There aren’t even ads on my web sites! I have thus far produced more than 1,000 articles for the blog and taped close to 80 shows for the podcast, not to mention the countless public lectures that I give. For the latter I sometimes do get an honorarium, but more often than not I offer to do them at cost (i.e., only travel expenses paid). Many such lectures are taped and distributed for free on my YouTube channel and other outlets. But why should anyone demand that everything I do be made available for free? Shouldn’t that choice be up to the author (or musician, or director, or whatever) who actually produced the work? [2]

All of the above said, of course, I think that the crime of illegally copying or downloading music, videos and books (unless done on an industrial scale for reselling purposes) is a fairly minor one, certainly when compared to violent crimes, many white collar crimes, war crimes, and so on. So talk of years of jail time and millions of dollars of fines is ludicrous, and results from the pressure put on prosecutors by panic-stricken large corporations who see the clear and present danger of largely ill-gotten profits vanish overnight. Nonetheless, a crime it remains. And more importantly, an unethical thing to do, whether permitted by the law or not. I would very much like to hear any coherent ethical defense of the opposing viewpoint. But please don’t tell me that people have a natural right to free information. The very idea of natural rights, as Jeremy Bentham famously put it, is nonsense on stilts. Which just happens to be the title of my previous book...

———

[1] Despite the general gist of this post, I am extremely sympathetic to the idea that most academic papers should be made available for free, on the ground that much of the money and effort that goes into writing them comes from the public purse. Which is why many of my own papers are indeed available for free on my platofootnote.org site, and why I edit an online open access academic journal devoted to the intersection between biology and philosophy.

[2] Another complex, but related discussion here concerns the concept of copyright. My position in that regard is that copyright should rest only and exclusively with the author, not the publisher, on the grounds that s/he is the creative force behind the work (as opposed to the packaging or distributing forces). And I adamantly think that copyright should not be inherited by the author’s “estate.” My daughter didn’t write any of my books, I don’t see why she should be benefiting from them past my death. Instead, they should automatically enter the public domain.

To Fling Poo or Not to Fling Poo...

by Steve Neumann

Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape. —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

In the metaphorical agora of ideas, and especially in the clashes that take place in political and religious discourse, passionate emotions often rival, if not completely override, rational dialogue. This is not surprising, given the fact that we humans are primates. In the 2005 animated movie Madagascar, there are two minor characters, Mason and Phil, who are chimpanzees. Mason, who has a charming British accent, is Phil’s urbane interpreter; Phil is both mute and very temperamental:

Mason: I heard Tom Wolfe is speaking at Lincoln Center.

Phil: (Signs something vigorously at Mason)

Mason: Well of course we're going to throw poo at him!

So we humans come by it honestly. But, research indicating that poop-throwing by chimps may be a sign of intelligence aside, must civility be a casualty of the Culture Wars?

Not so, says my friend and fellow Nietzschephile (is that a word?) Dan Fincke of Camels with Hammers over at Patheos. Dan has published the Civility Pledge, and he is encouraging his fellow bloggers and other writers to sign it. So far the responses have been mixed: see here and here, for instance. I like the idea of a Civility Pledge not only because I think it has the potential to enable true progress in our discourse, but because it’s a piece of self-overcoming, at least for me. I am a very sarcastic person with my close friends and my two siblings. As the Facebook profile cliché has it: I’m fluent in sarcasm. It comes quite naturally to me, and it’s a self-conscious act on my part to modulate my delivery, whether written or verbal. To be honest, I’m not always successful. 

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to sign the Pledge; and unlike the two bloggers I linked to above, I’d rather focus on the nature of intellectual discourse in general in this post, instead of the merits or demerits of the Pledge itself. But if you’re a blogger or other writer, I encourage you to at least go check it out. 

No matter what the topic — sports, music, food, or politics — each of us expresses his valuations usually with the motive of convincing his interlocutor of our correctness. This tendency is so automatic as to be instinctual. But like an undersea artifact obscured by a couple millennia of aquatic accretions, it seems that the two notions of dialectic and rhetoric have been similarly disfigured. An Aristotelian understanding of discourse considered rhetoric to be a counterpart to dialectic. Rhetoric didn’t have the pejorative connotation it has today: e.g., “All I hear on TV anymore is the same old political rhetoric.”

Furthermore, rhetoric today, especially in the blogosphere and social media, seems to be rife with more or less ad hominem epithets. Just to be clear (and Dan Fincke is equally clear in his Civility Pledge), attacking an intellectual opponent’s positions with passion doesn’t necessarily mean one is engaging in ad hominem attacks. I do believe that impassioned dialogue tends to activate one’s psychological defenses more so than an equable discussion does, but I don’t see anything wrong with arguing with zeal per se. 

How often do we argue with the aim of getting at the truth of a matter (dialectics)? How often do we argue with the aim of persuading someone (rhetoric)? I’d be willing to guess that we tend to want to convince more often than we want to discover. Can we have it both ways? Presumably, most of us are arguing in support of our valuations because we believe they are true, and therefore others ought to value them as we do.

The Point

To get one’s point across —
across what, you might ask?
A vast, unbridgeable gap?
But what if you tried too hard and
overshot, as if hurling a hefty spear
or slender arrow, not aiming to maim 
or kill, just convince the other fellow?
The point in getting one’s point across 
still remains, ostensibly, for two to reach 
consensus, even détente, rather than 
an altogether senseless folie à deux.

We humans are constantly trying to change each other: we want our spouse to be tidier, our boss to be more respectful, our friend to be nicer. I’ve talked about the four quadrants of operant conditioning in a previous post. Operant conditioning describes how animals’ behavior changes in response to environmental stimuli. And we all employ tactics from these quadrants, whether we realize it or not, in varying degrees to change the behavior of others. We continually nag our spouse to put away his dirty clothes until he finally gets tired of hearing it (negative reinforcement) and puts them in the hamper; we take away our teenager’s gaming privileges if he comes home with a bad report card (negative punishment), hoping this will somehow motivate him to do better next time; we make our daughter do the dishes if she keeps picking on her little sister (positive punishment); and all too infrequently we buy our friend a nice bottle of wine for showing us some kindness (positive reinforcement).

Experience shows that all four methods of operant conditioning are effective in changing behavior, but to varying degrees. Punishment is by far humanity’s preferred method, though it is unreliable in most cases; and it tends to engender other undesirable fallout: evasion, secrecy, fear, mistrust, etc. The subject who is punished usually doesn’t learn anything from the punishment, other than how to avoid punishment in the future! And the punisher himself gets reinforced every time his punishment seems to work. It can be a vicious cycle. 

Karen Pryor, author of Don’t Shoot the Dog and one of the co-founders of clicker training for animals (especially dogs), espouses a philosophy of positive reinforcement for behavior change. She offers some steps for being a “changemaker”:

1. When they ignore you, find allies and persist.

2. Don’t be misled by lip service. Find allies and persist.

3. Meet resistance with persistence. Move around the resistance; try other avenues.

4. The stage of open attack is a touchy time. People can get fired, for example. Keep your head down, but persist. Don’t take the attack personally, even if it is a personal attack. Attack is information; it tells you:

a) You're getting somewhere: change is happening, causing extinction-induced aggression.

b) Your attacker is frightened. Empathize.

c) Your attacker still believes in the efficacy of aversives.

5. Absorbing and utilizing: this stage can last a year or more. Maintain generous schedules of reinforcement.

6. They're taking credit for your idea? By all means let them; your goal is the change. Credit is a low-cost reinforcer and people who want it don’t satiate. Give it away in buckets.

7. Are they pitching the change? Good. If you want to change something else, you now have new allies.

Her outline here is meant primarily for effecting change in a work environment; but with a few adjustments one could apply these principles to any kind of change, really. And nowhere does she suggest or encourage bullying, berating or intimidating. 

In my job as a guide dog mobility instructor I not only train dogs, I teach visually-impaired human students. Whether I’m teaching a new student or one who has had a guide dog before, there is often much behavior that needs to be either taught or changed. There are essentially two options open to me: I can either constantly tell them what they’re doing wrong, or I can positively reinforce what I want them to do right. I can nag and berate them; or I can identify an objective, highlight it, and then reinforce it — Yes! Good! There is an organization, a movement, really, called TAGteach International whose aim is to educate teachers in all disciplines in the use of concise, effective positive reinforcement. Essentially, its paradigm is one of applying clicker training principles for animals to humans. And it works.

But what about the relation between belief and behavior? We all try to change behaviors, but in the Culture Wars we also try to change beliefs. How are they related? Does behavior simply flow from belief, or is it more complex than that? Do we need to change beliefs first, and then assume that behavior will change? Or is our only recourse to try to change behavior and not worry about changing beliefs?

Let’s take marriage equality as an example. Generally speaking, those who are religious tend to oppose it, while those who aren’t religious, or lack a strong religious belief, tend to either support it or remain neutral about it (i.e., live and let live). Personally, I support marriage equality: I see no good reason why two people of the same sex shouldn’t be allowed to get married. Further, I think that religious objections to marriage equality don’t hold water. And, I find it unfair that opponents of marriage equality attempt to legislate their religious morality and try to use the force of the State to prevent same sex couples from getting married. 

Assuming change is what I’m after, and not simply winning an argument, should I try to alter the belief of my opponents? Or should I merely try to convince them not to lobby and vote against marriage equality, and leave their belief untouched? Or should I try to lobby to prevent them from legislating their belief? No matter which tack I choose, it doesn’t behoove me to engage in ridicule and condescension. If my opponent cites the Bible in defense of his position, I confess that my first impulse is to ridicule. But this happens, in my case, because his citation activates in me a constellation of judgments on propositions and assertions related to all things biblical. And my reaction is immediate because I know I’ve already rejected them, finding them to be unsupported, generally refuted, or facile. 

Ultimately, if change is possible at all, I think it’s easier to change behavior rather than belief. Beliefs are so essential to who we are, or at least who we feel ourselves to be. And as social creatures, we humans are literally awash in configurations of reinforcement and punishment as we navigate that social environment. Also, our behavior can be so protean as to be undetectable; or at least the reasons for changes in our behavior are often occluded from our reflective Eye of Sauron. 

When we consciously intend to change the behavior of others, we don’t really need to resort to name-calling, caustic sarcasm, or condescension, even though it seems to exude from us as naturally and surely as salty effluvium on a hot summer’s day.

Toward a science of morality. An annotated response to Michael Shermer.

by Massimo Pigliucci

Michael Shermer and I have been engaged in what I hope has been a productive discussion on the relationship between science and philosophy as it concerns the field of ethics. Roughly speaking, Michael contends that science has a lot to say about ethical questions (though he is not quite as reductive as Sam Harris, who contends that science is pretty much the only game in town when it comes to ethics). I respond that science provides informative background but grossly underdetermines ethical issues, which therefore require philosophical reflection. Michael’s opening salvo was followed by my response, with Shermer recently adding some thoughts, further articulating his position. The notes below are my point-by-point commentary on that third round. (Throughout, italics indicates Michael’s writing, with my comments immediately following.)

...I begin with a Principle of Moral Good: Always act with someone else’s moral good in mind, and never act in a way that leads to someone else’s moral loss...

Well, that sounds good (and mighty close to Kant’s famous categorical imperative), except for the significant degree of begging the question hidden in Michael’s principle (but not in Kant’s). What is a moral good? Reading the principle as it stands I would have pretty much no idea of how to actually act, or whether my acting would lead to someone else’s moral good or loss.

...Even if there is a God, divine command theory was refuted 2500 years ago by Plato through his “Euthyphro’s dilemma”...

Good point. So we have at least one example of a philosopher arriving at a major — and still standing — conclusion about morality regardless of empirical evidence or scientific insight...

...The Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) has a severe limitation to it: What if the moral receiver thinks differently from the moral doer? ... This is why in my book The Science of Good and Evil I introduced the Ask-First Principle: To find out whether an action is right or wrong ask first.

Besides the fact that the golden rule is strictly speaking a religious, not a philosophical precept, I don’t see the difference at all. The ask-first principle seems to suffer from precisely the same problem as the golden rule. What if someone wanted to be hurt, or humiliated, or being treated as inferior? Would that make it ok? It’s not just 12-yr old girls belonging to the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (to use Michael’s example) who may be morally incompetent or not sufficiently mature.

Most men, for example, are much more receptive toward unsolicited offers of sex than are women.

This is just a parenthetical observation, Michael, but that study has been debunked, together with a lot of the other questionable “science” about gender we get from a certain brand of evolutionary psychology...

... applying evolutionary theory to not only the origins of morality but to its ultimate foundation as well, it seems to me that the individual is a reasonable starting point...

Two problems here: first, Michael confuses evolutionary explanations for the origin of morality with the much more complex, and extremely culturally dependent, context of modern-day moral decision making. Natural selection has pretty much nothing to tell us about under what circumstances abortion may be acceptable or not, whether we should pursue drone warfare, or whether health and education should be considered as human rights. Second, morality is an inherently social phenomenon, so I’d say that the individual is precisely the wrong place to start.

... The survival and flourishing of the individual is the foundation for establishing values and morals, and so determining the conditions by which humans best survive and flourish ought to be the goal of a science of morality.

Natural selection has everything to do with survival (and reproduction), but pretty much nothing to do with flourishing. The latter, in turn, is an inherently cultural concept, that is difficult to articulate and whose specifics vary with time and geography. Which means that Michael’s “smooth transition” between is and ought is anything but smooth.

In his annual letter Bill Gates outlined how and why the progress of the human condition can best be implemented when tracked through scientific data...

This seems to me a good example of a recurring confusion on the part of those who claim that science can answer moral questions. No philosopher would doubt Gates’ statement. But that data becomes relevant only after one has already engaged in moral judgment and decided that we ought to reduce poverty. It is, rather, a very sensible way to check whether our actual policies are having the desired effect. Shermer et al. seem to confuse ethics with social policy. It is the first that informs the second, not the other way around.

This is why Bill Gates is backing with his considerable wealth and talent the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals program...

Good for Gates. But Bill Gates has also decided that public education is a rotten concept and has put his considerable wealth and talent in the service of undermining it. I think that was a bad decision, and yet I’m sure Mr. Gates can easily produce statistics that measure how well his misguided policy is being implemented.

A second example may be found on the opposite end of the economic scale in a study conducted for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled “Subjective Well-Being, Income, Economic Development and Growth” by the University of Pennsylvania economists Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, in which they compared survey data on subjective well-being (“happiness”) with income and economic growth rates in 140 countries.

I am aware of that sort of survey, and I appreciate their value, as is clear in several chapters of my Answers for Aristotle (where I explore the relationship between science and philosophy in a number of areas of human interest, from morality to love). But “subjective” well-being has little to do with morality, since it is about the psychological satisfaction of an individual. That satisfaction can be easily increased by just hooking said individual to a perpetual drug machine, as philosopher Robert Nozick famously pointed out, something that can straightforwardly be argued would actually be morally wrong. Besides, again, morality is about how we behave towards others, not about how happy we feel.

Why does money matter morally? Because it leads to a higher standard of living. Why does a higher standard of living matter morally? Because it increases the probability that an individual will survive and flourish. Why does survival and flourishing matter morally? Because it is the basis of the evolution of all life on earth through natural selection.

Given what I have written so far, and in my previous post, I’ll leave it to the reader to unpack the above chain of reasoning and show where he goes wrong (hint: there are at two problems with it, but I may have missed an additional one or two).

The fact that there may be many types of democracies (direct v. representative) and economies (with various trade agreements or membership in trading blocks) only reveals that human survival and flourishing is multi-faceted and multi-causal, and not that because there is more than one way to survive and flourish means that all political, economic, and social systems are equal.

I’m afraid this is a straight straw man. To my knowledge, no moral or political philosopher has argued that “all political, economic, and social systems are equal,” so I don’t think this requires a response, except insofar as it shows that science enthusiasts tend to read little philosophy, moral or otherwise. (Which, of course, is fine, except when they then go on to make major claims about the limitations of moral philosophy.)

We know that belief in supernatural sorcery and witchcraft and their concomitant consequences of torturing and murdering those so accused is wrong because it decreases the survival and flourishing of individuals — just ask first the woman about to be torched. ... The ultimate solution is science and education in understanding the natural causes of things and the debunking of supernatural beliefs in sorcery and witchcraft. And it is science that tells us why witchcraft and sorcery is immoral.

Not at all. Science tells us that witchcraft and sorcery are unfounded superstitions, not that they are immoral. If they were real, and people really used them to kill innocents, then it would be perfectly moral to prosecute the perpetrators (though not to burn them alive. But again, why not? Because we think torture and the death penalty are immoral on ethical grounds, since they respectively cause needless suffering and are done out of revenge, neither of which are morally salient reasons). Also, about Shermer’s “just ask” principle: clearly it won’t work. Just ask the murderer who is serving life in prison if he’d rather do something else with his life. Certainly his ability to flourish has been curtailed by society, but presumably this is happening because of a (philosophically) justified moral judgment.

There seem to be two major sources of error in Michael’s reasoning about science and morality. First, his insistence on evidence-based decisions is perfectly appropriate to the implementation of policies, but it is entirely unclear how it applies to the sort of issues that moral philosophers actually discuss. Just as an exercise, try reading any chapter of Michael Sandel’s Justice and let me know which of the questions that Sandel discusses so clearly would be settled by empirical evidence. Again, empirical evidence is relevant to our ethical choices but it grossly underdetermines them.

Second, Michael keeps talking about survival and flourishing in a single breadth, invoking natural selection as working to increase both. This is absolutely wrong. Natural selection increases survival, and even that only insofar as it assures reproduction (after that, good luck to you, my friend!). Selection has nothing whatsoever to do with flourishing, the realization of which completely breaks any evolutionarily based “smooth transition” between is and ought. Not to mention, of course, that Michael should know that natural selection likely also produced a number of nasty behavioral patterns in humans (e.g., xenophobia), which we have been trying  — in good part through philosophizing about them! — to get rid of throughout the past couple of millennia.

So, again, science — or more broadly, factual evidence — most certainly has a place at the high table of any meaningful discussion about how to achieve human goals and fulfill human desires. But philosophical reflection remains central to ethics because ethics is about reasoning on the implications of and conflicts generated by those goals and desires. To put it as Kant did: “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”