Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Pragmatism and Pantheism: a Match made in Nature

I begin with the zeitgeist, with where our species is at in the early twenty-first century. Philosophical questions can be more or less responsible, depending on the extent to which they grapple with the background assumptions of the prevailing culture. Thousands of years ago, theocracy of one form or another amounted to the conventional wisdom. An empire governed the land and dictated the official myths, although underground folklore flourished in villages due to the lack of mass education. Today, though, we still live in the Age of Reason that began several centuries ago in Europe, in that science and technology are now the chief sources of human power. The respectable thinker today must therefore grapple with ideas that arise out of this “modern” milieu, and so we should begin with the naturalistic dismissal of miracle claims and of traditional religious myths. We start our philosophical questioning by deferring, to some extent, to scientists and engineers who have largely created the postindustrial world we take for granted.

From Naturalism to Pragmatism

Naturalism entails pragmatism in that one of the core assumptions of the myths that should be dismissed is anthropocentrism. Humility should be the most celebrated virtue, although technological progress and capitalistic self-centeredness are more likely to infantilize us. As we learn in High School science or philosophy classes, Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin removed us from our presumed central position in the universe, by showing literally that Earth isn’t geometrically central, that our planet revolves around one of trillions of stars and that we evolved along with all the other species that crawl, swim or fly. Once we absorb that humiliating lesson, we can no longer in good conscience take at face value foundational knowledge claims. In short, we enter the postmodern phase of hyperskepticism. In particular, we should doubt not just obsolete religious traditions, but the hang-over dogma of the correspondence theory of truth.

As the British say, we fancy that when we know something we’re in possession of an absolutely adequate re-presentation of the fact. If I know that the daytime sky is blue, my belief is supposed to agree with the fact. But that’s a dogma that’s every bit as silly as theism. Whether it’s implemented in a brain state or in a written or spoken statement, my “representation” of the blue sky is nothing of the sort. “The sky is blue” presents again the factual properties of the daytime sky just as much as a xylophone embodies a weed whacker. Granted, anything can carry information about something else in that if you read the tea leaves with enough of a detective’s ingenuity, you can learn useful tidbits about a cause from its effect. So if a brand of weed whackers happens to be manufactured by a company that also sells xylophones, the one might indirectly tell us something about the other. Likewise, having seen daytime skies many times and having retained memories of those experiences, the sky has a causal impact on my thoughts. Playing the role of detective, I can infer that the sky has such and such properties, based on the traces the sky leaves in my brain. But that doesn’t mean those traces are objectively adequate to the entirety of the facts, that my thoughts or statements about the sky capture the essence of what the sky is so that the latter is present once again in the representation. On the contrary, my folk conceptions are parochial and even a scientific explanation of the sky’s colour is all-too human for having the ulterior motive of instrumentalism. Scientific theories are formulated to empower our species at nature’s expense, the goal being to learn enough about natural causality for us to pacify the universe’s inhumanity. Our concepts carve up the world into digestible morsels, but just because we can’t fathom the sky in its noumenal aspect or understand what the sky is in relation to everything else in the universe doesn’t mean there’s no such inhuman fact that mocks the claim that our knowledge is empirically adequate.

So we should be pragmatic about human knowledge, because the Scientific Revolution should have taught us all to be humble and skeptical. This pragmatism means we should recognize that as far as we can tell, knowledge is part of an animalistic process: knowledge comes in the form of a map or model that’s used to achieve some goal. This is why scientism should be dismissed along with exoteric religions, because the possibility of nonscientific (noninstrumentalist or non-power-driven) goals makes for the possibility of nonscientific knowledge, given a pragmatic interpretation of knowledge. To say that knowledge is just a tool in the fulfillment of some goal needn’t then be taken as a betrayal of pragmatism, since the pragmatic picture of knowledge would likewise be just a tool. We needn’t presuppose a realist view of what it means to say so and so is real. As long as we remain humble, we can be tentative even in our philosophical generalizations, and so although language may push us to affirm what we propose to be true, we should remind ourselves that all our beliefs and statements are likely wildly biased descriptions.

Thursday, December 20, 2018

Are all Americans Guilty of Hate Crimes against President Trump?

Dateline: D.C.— Under federal hate crime laws, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has targeted both critics and supporters of President Trump, for “abusing a mentally incompetent old man,” according to a spokesperson for Mr. Mueller’s office.

“If you saw a physically disabled person and instead of helping her out, you berated her ruthlessly or else lured into making a fool of herself, you could easily foul afoul of hate speech laws,” said the spokesperson.

These laws are designed to prevent crimes committed on the basis of a person’s protected characteristics such as her race, religion or gender—but also her disability.

Taking for granted that President Trump is mentally incompetent, that the president suffers from a host of personality disorders including malignant narcissism, as well as from senility and other cognitive dysfunctions associated with old age and gluttony, Mr. Mueller’s office “is appalled by the reckless abandon with which both critics and supporters of the president” have “taken advantage of Trump's disabilities.”

Democrats and other harsh critics of the president have demonized Donald Trump, whereas they should have given him “special consideration for his inability to think or to behave at an adult level,” according to Mr. Mueller’s office.

Said the spokesperson, “You don’t expect a blind man to excel at seeing, nor a deaf woman to excel at hearing. Yet a world-class bullshitter, con artist, egotist, and sadist with as maniacal a mind as Donald Trump’s is expected to lead a nation in anything like a responsible fashion? No sir, that’s discrimination: that’s the insane lack of a double standard when the need for an exception is obvious.”

On the other side, Mr. Trump’s fervent supporters are just as culpable, according to Mr. Mueller’s office. Instead of demonizing the president for failing to be normal, despite his mental disabilities, the supporters have egged on the president to ever more self-destructive provocations.

“The president’s rallies are typically interpreted as revealing the extent to which the president craves validation,” said the spokesperson. “But what’s not widely noted is that the supporters are resentful trolls who likewise crave something, namely vengeance against the establishment. They’re using Mr. Trump as a bull in the China shop, exploiting his mental inadequacies. So they too are arguably guilty of hate crimes—not just against Jews or Mexicans, but against their so-called cult leader.”

Rather than being a Svengali who dictates what his base of supporters should do or say, president Trump is “the helpless victim of these trolls,” according to Mr. Mueller’s office. “The president has lost all contact with reality and can’t control himself, so how could he be expected to mastermind the antics of millions of Republicans?”

Rumours have circulated in Washington that after Mr. Mueller has indicted the president, his family, his businesses, and his enablers in Russia, the Middle East, and the Republican Party for committing an astonishing assortment of crimes, he’ll proceed with the next phase of his investigation and indict “all remaining Americans for hate crimes against the subhuman president,” as one legal analyst put it.

“Bob Mueller is the straightest arrow in the nation’s quiver,” said the analyst. “As he sees it, if the whole country is guilty of crimes, then lock up the nation! We’re a nation of laws. The citizens are secondary.”

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Does Cognitive Science Undermine Democracy?

Did you know there’s a straightforward cognitive scientific argument against democracy? Here it is:

(1) People are inherently irrational (as shown by cognitive science).
(2) Unless somehow corrected, this irrationality is bound to manifest in a population on average or in the aggregate. 
(3) Irrational government is ill-equipped to recognize or address, let alone to solve, large-scale, complex problems such as those that arise in a globalized world. 
(4) Therefore, giving political power even indirectly to the majority of citizens in a society (rather than to individuals who may be exceptions to the rule of irrationality and who thus comprise some minority) is unwise.
Cognitive science has confirmed that logic and science are counterintuitive, that we’re biased against reason. See, for example, this summary of twenty-four of our cognitive biases. To name just a few, there’s the Sunk-Cost Fallacy, according to which we irrationally cling to things that have already cost us. This is how gambling addictions work. Or there’s the Barnum Effect of our seeing personal specifics in vague statements, by our filling in the gaps, which is how astrology and Tarot readings work. There’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect: the more you know, the less confident you’re likely to be, and conversely (and disastrously) the less you know, the more confident you’re likely to be. So the most ignorant and least qualified are likely the loudest voices in the room. This, of course, explains Trumpism. Or there’s Declinism, according to which we remember the past as better than it was, and expect the future to be worse than it will likely be. This explains the popularity both of the Garden of Eden myth and of future-oriented, apocalyptic narratives, as well as the conservative appeal to traditions. And so on and so forth.

Then there’s this list of ten politically incorrect psychological findings about the immorality of human nature. For example, “We view minorities and the vulnerable as less than human.” Moreover, “We believe in karma—assuming that the downtrodden of the world deserve their fate.” We’re “blinkered and dogmatic,” since “we see opposing facts as undermining our sense of identity.” Moreover, we’re “vain and overconfident” in that “most of us walk about with inflated views of our abilities and qualities, such as our driving skills, intelligence and attractiveness.” Also, “We favour ineffective leaders with psychopathic traits,” since these traits “are more common than average among leaders.” And “men and women are sexually attracted, at least in the short term, to people displaying the so-called ‘dark triad’ of traits—narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism—thus risking further propagating these traits.”

Democracy and Subjugation

All of which will have some evolutionary advantage or other that’s no longer relevant to an awakened species that can recognize nature’s absurdity. But the point is that the broader something’s appeal to us, the more we turn to our average behaviour and choices which express the flaws of our nature, the more irrational the eventual outcome. Democracy empowers the majority and is thus liable to be an engine of irrationality in the political sphere. When we vote in an election, the idiosyncratic reasons for our choice in a politician are discounted. All that matters is the total of votes received, and in a sufficiently large population the idiosyncrasies average out, leaving the deficiencies of our nature as the culprits in accounting for the winners and losers. Thus, any notion of popular wisdom is oxymoronic. That is, there’s no such thing as wisdom that emerges generally across a large population. If such a population happens to act wisely or for the best, that will be accidental because the average reasons for the popular embrace of the policy will be irrational. The synoptic view of human affairs is therefore harrowing because at that sociological level of explanation, there’s no rhyme or reason for what's observed; instead, mob behaviour is farcical and disappointing in its animalism.  

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Inhuman Surprises: Karl Friston’s Theory of (Normal) Life

Neuroscientist Karl Friston
Wired Magazine calls Karl Friston “the genius neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI.” Friston, a psychiatrist and authority on neuroimaging, has written dozens of papers on his theory of everything related to life. The heart of the theory is the free energy principle, otherwise known as the principle of active inference, the idea being a generalization of Bayes’ Theorem. All organisms, says Friston, strive to maintain the health of their internal order by modeling the unobservable causes of their sensory states, so as to minimize “free energy” or surprise. This is done not just by making predictions and testing representational models, but by active inference, a type of embodied cognition whereby the organism selectively samples the environment and works to make the world less surprising by modifying it, thus providing evidence that the world isn’t so scary after all. The more energy is allowed to roam free, beyond the creature’s control, the more entropy wins out against the creature’s internal order. With this theory, Friston means to explain all aspects of life.

In a co-written paper, called The Markov blankets of life:autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle, Friston incorporates the machine learning concept of a Markov blanket. This “blanket” is that which “defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense,” the authors write. The states that make up the blanket can be “partitioned into active and sensory states,” meaning the states that occur spontaneously inside the organism, such as its interpretations or its voluntary bodily movements, and those states impressed upon the organism from the outer world, such as its sensations. Thus, the trick in life is to infer or control the unknown causes of the sensory states, by employing the active states. When this is done poorly, the organism is bound to be surprised by the world which makes for wear and tear, including ill-health and eventually death. We can control circumstances only for so long, of course, before the universe of unknowns nullifies our feeble schemes for holding them back or transforming them.

Here, though, is how Friston and his cowriters lay out some of the ideas:
Active inference, in its simplest formulation, describes the tendency of random dynamical systems to minimize (on average) their free energy, where free energy is an upper bound on (negative) marginal likelihood or evidence (i.e. the probability of finding the system in a particular state, given the system in question). This implies that the kind of self-organization of Markov blankets we consider results in processes that work entirely to optimize evidence, namely self-evidencing dynamics underlying the autonomous organization of life, as we know it. In Bayesian statistics, the evidence is known as ‘model’ evidence, where we can associate the internal states with a model of the external states.
The writers clarify that
any system that minimizes entropy by acting to minimize uncertainty about the hidden causes of its sensations must have a model of the kind of regularities it expects to encounter in its environment. This means that, over (phylogenetic and ontogenetic) time, an organism will become a model of its environment…In other words, it suggests that regularities in the environment of an organism become embodied in the organism—if the organism or species persists. Under the free energy principle, this implies that organisms are close to optimal models of their local surroundings, i.e. their niche. Organisms become close to optimal models by minimizing variational free energy, which bounds the evidence for each phenotype or individual model [25]. This does not imply that an agent must (somehow) construct an internal model (i.e. representation) of its outer environment. It simply means that an agent becomes a statistical model of its niche in the sense of coming to embody statistical regularities of its world in its physical and functional composition.
Applying these biological concepts to the evolution of culture and of people would amount to a Theory of Everything—for Normies. The goal in human life, too, would be to map and to control the unknown, and the complete elimination of surprise would be dystopian. Friston’s theory arises from the pretense of hyperrationality and so evinces the lunacy that’s commonly mistaken for neutral sanity.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

The Unique "Strengths" of Christianity

One trope you’ll find in Christian writings is that their religion is unique because of the life and teachings of Jesus. Invariably, these apologists take their scriptures at face value and rattle off a list of Jesus’ miracles, from his virgin birth to his curing of diseases to his resurrection and ascension. Amusingly, one such article compares Christianity to other religions, summarizing the teachings of Hinduism and adding by way of refutation, “Hinduism as it is actually practiced consists largely of superstition, legendary stories about the gods, occult practices, and demon worship.” There is, of course, no way to take that response seriously without casting an equally skeptical eye on Christianity. The palpable double standard shows that the trope of laying out a case for Christianity’s unique reliability is mere pretense and sales technique.

Obviously, if Hindus engaged in occult practices, why not say the same about Jesus’s magic healings? Or if Hindu stories of gods are legendary, Christianity’s could be the same. As demonstrated in just the last few centuries when critical scholars finally studied the Bible in an objective manner, the case for Christianity’s historicity was never as strong as the official presentation of the scriptures misled the world to believe. The four gospel narratives, for example, aren’t independent of each other, no one knows who wrote them, and they appear to have been written several decades or more after the events in question. Moreover, these narratives find fault with each other as the authors edit unwanted parts of the rival gospel. The earliest New Testament writings, Paul’s letters, hardly ever refer to Jesus as an historical person. Meanwhile, early non-Christian references to Jesus are now infamous for being forgeries (the Josephus passage), confused and irrelevant (Suetonius’ reference to the Roman expulsion of Jews who had been agitated by “Chrestus”), or of otherwise dubious evidentiary value (the second-hand references which show only that there were early Christian practices, not that the Christians’ beliefs about Jesus are accurate). 

If we should take partisan ravings for granted and mistake fiction or myth for history, why not accept that every cult leader was the greatest person to have ever lived or that Hercules was the strongest man because of his epic labours?

Jesus’s Moral Revolution

Leaving aside, then, the preposterous appeals to evidence for Jesus’s supernatural uniqueness, there’s still the question whether the religion’s natural aspects, such as its teachings and historical impact are unique. In particular, says the theologian David Bentley Hart, Christianity improved on the pagan world in that Jesus introduced the concept of the universality of personhood, bestowing on all humans the right to dignity. Originally, writes Hart,
at least in many very crucial contexts, “persons” were something of a rarity in nature. At least, as far as ancient Roman legal usage, one’s person was the status one held before the law, and this was anything but an invariable property among all individuals…To “have a person”—habere personam—was to have a face before the eyes of the law, to possess the rights of a free and propertied citizen, to be entrusted to offer testimony on the strength of one’s own word, to be capable before a magistrate of appeal to higher authority. At the far opposite end of the social scale, however, was that far greater number of individuals who could be classed as “non habentes personas,” “not having persons”—not, as it were, having faces before the law or, for that matter, before society. The principal occupants of this category were, of course, slaves.
To slaves we might add women, since they too were second-class citizens in patriarchal societies.