Philosophy Bites Podcast on the Ethical Behavior of Ethicists

I'm a fan of the Philosophy Bites podcasts, put together by David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton. In their 15-minute podcasts, Nigel and Dave interview leading philosophers on a wide range of philosophical topics. One of the most impressive features of Philosophy Bites is how quickly Nigel and David can penetrate to the heart a topic, in plain language.

So it was a delight and an honor to be interviewed by Dave and Nigel when I was in Britain a few weeks ago. The resulting podcast -- on the moral behavior of ethicists -- is now up at the Philosophy Bites website here.

A Modest Proposal

That no new form-filling be added to our lives without retiring an existing form that takes equal time to complete.

I will consider any arguments that readers care to advance on behalf of the thesis that we do not spend sufficient time completing forms. If I am convinced, I will withdraw my proposal.

Fiction and Skepticism

Regular Splintered Mind readers will notice that I've started posting short speculative fiction about once a month (labeled science fiction, but sometimes more fantasy or thought experiment). I seem to be increasingly drawn to write that sort of thing. It's fun to write, and I have tenure, and a few people seem to like it, so why not?

But I've been thinking about whether I can defend this new behavior of mine from a philosophical perspective. Is there something one can do, philosophically, with fiction that one can't, or can't as easily, do with expository prose? I think of all the great philosophers who have tried their hand at fiction or who have integrated fictions into their philosophical work -- Plato, Voltaire, Boethius, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Zhuangzi, Rousseau, Unamuno, Kierkegaard... -- and I think there must be something to it. (I think too of fiction writers who develop philosophical themes, such as Borges.) It is not, I'm inclined to think, merely a secondary pursuit, unconnected to their philosophy, or a pretty but inessential way of costuming philosophy that could equally well be conveyed in a more conventional manner.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi has long been a favorite of mine, and my first published paper was on his use of language toward skeptical ends, including his use of absurd stories and strange dialogues. Zhuangzi used absurd stories, I think, partly to undercut his own authority, and partly to present possibilities for the reader to consider -- possibilities that he wanted to put forward, but not to endorse. For similar ends, I think, he used dialogues in which it was not clear which of the interlocutors was right, or which interlocutor represented his own view.

Zhuangzi could have said "here's a possibility, but I don't know whether to endorse it; here's one position, here's another, but I don't know which is right" -- writing in expository prose rather than fiction; and indeed sometimes that is exactly what he did. But fiction engages the reader's mind somewhat differently; and if Zhuangzi is aiming to unseat the reader's confidence in her presuppositions, perhaps it's best to have a diverse toolbox. Fiction engages the imagination and the emotions more vividly, perhaps; it's also less threatening in a way -- "just" fiction, not advertised truth, an invitation more than a demand. Perhaps, too, it differs in content: Even saying "I don't know" or "Both of these options seem like live possibilities" is to make an assertion, whereas fiction does not assert, or does not assert in the usual way -- a deeper divergence from the norms of expository writing, and perhaps a way to avoid the skeptical paradox of asserting the truth of skepticism....

I think now, too, of Plato. In those dialogues where Socrates is the authority and clearly the voice of Plato, and the interlocutor is reduced to "It is so, Socrates" and presents only objections that can easily be addressed, it is not really dialogue, not really fiction. But elsewhere, Socrates stumbles into confusion, and the interlocutor might be right. Plato, too, uses parable (most famously, the allegory of the cave). Sometimes parables are just exposition in a tutu; but at their best, parables borrow some of the ambiguous richness of reality, with competing layers of meaning beyond what the author could express in prose. The author makes intuitive choices that she cannot explain but which add depth; those choices sometimes resonate with the reader, in a communication that no one fully understands.

I trust my sense of fun. There are parts of psychology I find fun, and I chase them to philosophical ends; there are experiments I thought it would fun to run, and I've found that they tangle around into more philosophy than I at first thought; and now that I've begun to think more seriously about fundamental metaphysics and the nature of value, I'm enjoying exploring these ideas, with the skeptic's hesitation to commit, through the medium of the thought experiment that merges into the parable that merges into a piece of science fiction or fantasy.

Perplexities of Consciousness Now in Paperback

MIT Press is listing it at $16.95, and Amazon has it at $13.05, last I checked. MIT Press has been terrific about keeping the book affordable (for a small-market academic text).

Discourse on the Size of God

An infinite and infinitely powerful God set the world in motion. Nothing remained to be created, so He became finite. He dwelled magnificent upon the mountain, twenty times the size of any man, throwing thunder and earthquakes – but the thunder and earthquakes were just for show. They arose from His perfectly crafted Laws of Nature, and His antics merely costumed them for our people to appreciate.

As our people matured, we no longer needed a mountain God and so God shrank to human form and walked among us, curing the sick (through natural methods, then mysterious to us) and speaking wisdom. But we tired of Him, so He became a forest fairy.

Sages visited God, Who now sat upon a daisy, and asked Him, are you truly the Creator of Our Universe? And God said yes, what does Size matter? They asked Him for a miracle and He said none was necessary. They asked Him for proof, and He said look into your hearts and know that I am God; and they knew.

The fairies were hunted to extinction, until no one believed in them any longer, and God became an ant. Sages no longer sought Him. The people became atheists.

Centuries passed. A chemist was looking through an electron microscope and saw God. God said, behold your Creator! The chemist said, you are not my Creator. God said, look into your heart, but the chemist could not do so. The chemist centrifuged Him, added Him to a reaction, and precipitated Him out. And God gloried in His Laws, behaving just as an organic molecule should.

A Smidgen of Dream Skepticism

Every night I dream. And often when I dream I seem to think that I am awake. Is it possible, then, that I'm dreaming now, as I sit here, or seem to, in my office?

How should I go about addressing this question? The natural place to start, it seems to me, is with my opinions about dreams -- opinions that might be entirely wrong and ill-founded if I'm dreaming or otherwise radically deceived, but which I seem, anyway, to find myself stuck with.

Based on these opinions, I don't find it at all likely that I'm dreaming. For one thing, I tend to favor a theory of dreams on which dreams don't involve perception-like experiences but rather only imagery experiences (see Ichikawa 2009). If that theory is correct, then from the fact -- I think it's a fact! -- that I'm now having perception-like experiences, it follows that I'm not dreaming.

However, theories of this sort admit of some doubt. In the history of philosophy and psychology, as I seem to recall, many thinkers have held that when we dream we have experiences indistinguishable from waking perceptions -- Descartes held this, for example, and more recently Allan Hobson. It would be foolish arrogance to think there is no chance that they are right about this. So maybe I should I should accept the imagination model of dreaming with only, say, 80% credence? That seems pretty close to the confidence level that I do in fact have, when I reflect on the matter.

But even if I allow some possibility that dream experiences are typically much like waking perceptions, I might remain confident that I'm not dreaming. After all, I don't feel like I'm asleep. Maybe my current visual, auditory, and tactile sensory experiences could come to me in a dream, but I think I'm more rational in my cognition than I normally am when dreaming. And I recall, seemingly, a more coherent past. And maybe the stability of the details of my experience is greater.

But again, it seems unwarranted to hold with 100% confidence that dreams can't be rational, coherent, and stable in the way my current attitudes and experience seems to be. After all, people (if I recall correctly) have pretty poor knowledge of the basic facts about dream experience (for example, its coloration). Or even if I do insist on perfect confidence in the instability, incoherence, and irrationality of typical dreams, it seems unwarranted for me to be 100% confident that this is not an exceptional dream of some sort. So maybe I should do another 80-20 split? Or 90-10? Let's say the latter. Conditionally upon a 20% credence in a theory of dreams on which we have waking-like sensory experiences while dreaming, I have about 90% confidence that, nonetheless, my current experience has some other feature, like stability or rational coherence, that establishes that I am not dreaming. That would leave me about 98% confident that I am awake.

But I can do better than that! On some philosophical theories, I couldn't even form the opinion that I might be dreaming unless I really am awake. Alternatively, maybe it's just constitutive of being a rational agent that I assume with 100% confidence that I am awake. Or maybe there's some other excellent refutation of dream doubt -- a refutation I can't currently articulate, but which nonetheless justifies my and others' normal assumption, when awake, that they are indeed awake. Such theories are attractive, since no one (well, almost no one) wants to be a dream skeptic! Dream skepticism is pretty bizarre! So hopefully philosophy can succor common sense in this matter, even I don't currently see exactly how. I'm not extremely confident about any such theory, especially without any compelling argument immediately to hand, but it seems likely that something can be worked out.

Thus, I am almost certain that I am awake. Probably dreams don't involve sense experiences of the sort I am having now; or even if they do, probably something else about my current experience establishes that I am not dreaming; or even if nothing in my current experience establishes that I am not dreaming, probably there is some excellent philosophical argument that would justify confidence in the fact that I am not currently dreaming. But of none of these things am I perfectly confident. My degree of certainty in the proposition that I am now awake is somewhat less than 100%. I hesitate to put a precise number on it, and yet it seems better to attach an approximate number than to keep to ordinary English terms that might be variously interpreted. To have only 90% credence that I am awake seems far more doubt than than is reasonable; I assume you'll agree. On the other hand, 99.9999% credence that I am awake seems considerably too high, once I really think about the matter. Somewhere on the order of 99.9% (or 99.99%?) confidence that I am currently awake, then?

Is that too strange -- not to be exactly spot-on 100% confident that I am awake?

Synchronized Movement and the Self-Other Boundary

I'm traveling around Britain. (Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and St Andrews so far, Sheffield and Bristol again tomorrow and the day after.) I have some post ideas, but I'm too worn out to trust my judgment that I'll do them right, so I'm going to exert the long-time blogger's privilege of reposting something from ancient days -- 2007! Jonathan Haidt and the rubber hand illusion aren't as cutting-edge in 2013 as they were in 2007, but still....

.......................................

I've been reading The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt -- one of those delightful books pitched to the non-specialist, yet accurate and meaty enough to be of interest to the specialist -- and I was struck by Haidt's description of historian William McNeill's work on synchronized movement among soliders and dancers:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that [military] drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual (McNeill 1997, p. 2).

Who'd have thought endless marching on the parade-grounds could be so fulfilling?

I am reminded of work by V.S. Ramachandran on the ease with which experimenters can distort the perceived boundaries of a subject's body. For example:

Another striking instance of a 'displaced' body part can be demonstrated by using a dummy rubber hand. The dummy hand is placed in front of a vertical partition on a table. The subject places his hand behind the partition so he cannot see it. The experimenter now uses his left hand to stroke the dummy hand while at the same time using his right hand to stroke the subject's real hand (hidden from view) in perfect synchrony. The subject soon begins to experience the sensations as arising from the dummy hand (Blotvinick and Cohen 1998) (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998, p. 1623).

Also:

The subject sits in a chair blindfolded, with an accomplice sitting in front of him, facing the same direction. The experimenter then stands near the subject, and with his left hand takes hold of the subject's left index finger and uses it to repeatedly and randomly to [sic] tap and stroke the nose of the accomplice while at the same time, using his right hand, he taps and strokes the subject's nose in precisely the same manner, and in perfect synchrony. After a few seconds of this procedure, the subject develops the uncanny illusion that his nose has either been dislocated or has been stretched out several feet forwards, demonstrating the striking plasticity or malleability of our body image (p. 1622).

So here's my thought: Maybe synchronized movement distorts body boundaries in a similar way: One feels the ground strike one's feet, repeatedly and in perfect synchrony with seeing other people's feet striking the ground. One does not see one's own feet. If Ramachandran's model applies, repeatedly receiving such feedback might bring one to (at least start to) see those other people's feet as one's own -- explaining, in turn, the phenomenology McNeill reports. Perhaps then it is no accident that armies and sports teams and dancing lovers practice moving in synchrony, causing a blurring of the experienced boundary between self and other?

The Moral Behavior of Ethics Professors and the Role of the Philosopher

Philosophers rarely seem surprised or unsettled when I present my work on the morality of ethicists -- work suggesting that ethics professors behave no differently than other professors or any more in accord with their own moral opinions (e.g., here). Amusement is a more common reaction; so also is dismissal of the relevancy of such results to philosophy. Such reactions reveal something, perhaps, about the role philosophical moral reflection is widely assumed to have in academia and in individual ethicists' personal lives.

I think of Randy Cohen's farewell column as ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine:

Writing the column has not made me even slightly more virtuous. And I didn't have to be.... I wasn't hired to personify virtue, to be a role model for kids, but to write about virtue in a way readers might find engaging. Consider sports writers: not 2 in 20 can hit the curveball, and why should they? They're meant to report on athletes, not be athletes. And that's the self-serving rationalization I'd have clung to had the cops hauled me off in handcuffs.

What spending my workday thinking about ethics did do was make me acutely aware of my own transgressions, of the times I fell short. It is deeply demoralizing.

(BTW, here's my initial reaction to Cohen's column.)

Josh Rust and I have found, for example, that although U.S.-based ethicists are much more likely than other professors to say it's bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals (60% say it is bad, vs. 45% of non-ethicist philosophers and only 19% of professors outside of philosophy), they are no less likely to report having eaten the meat of a mammal at their previous evening meal (37%, in our study, vs. 33% of non-ethicist philosophers and 45% of non-philosophers; details here and also in the previously linked paper). So we might consider the following scenario:

An ethicist philosopher considers whether it's morally permissible to eat the meat of factory-farmed mammals. She read Peter Singer. She reads objections and replies to Singer. She concludes that it is in fact morally bad to eat meat. She presents the material in her applied ethics class. Maybe she even writes on the issue. However, instead of changing her behavior to match her new moral opinions, she retains her old behavior. She teaches Singer's defense of vegetarianism, both outwardly and inwardly endorsing it, and then proceeds to the university cafeteria for a cheeseburger (perhaps feeling somewhat bad about doing so).

To the student who sees her in the cafeteria, our philosopher says: Singer's arguments are sound. It is morally wrong of me to eat this delicious cheeseburger. But my role as a philosopher is only to discuss philosophical issues, to present and evaluate philosophical views and arguments, not to live accordingly. Indeed, it would be unfair to expect me to live to higher moral standards just because I am an ethicist. I am paid to teach and write, like my colleagues in other fields; it would be an additional burden on me, not placed on them, to demand that I also live my life as a model. Furthermore, the demand that ethicists live as moral models would create distortive pressures on the field that might tend to lead us away from the moral truth. If I feel no inward or outward pressure to live according to my publicly espoused doctrines, then I am free to explore doctrines that demand high levels of self-sacrifice on an equal footing with more permissive doctrines. If instead I felt an obligation to live as I teach, I would be highly motivated to avoid concluding that wealthy people should give most of their money to charity or that I should never lie out of self-interest. The world is better served if the intellectual discourse of moral philosophy is undistorted by such pressures, that is, if ethicists are not expected to live out their moral opinions.

Such a view of the role of the philosopher is very different from the view of most ancient ethicists. Socrates, Confucius, and the Stoics sought to live according to the norms they espoused and invited others to judge their lives as an expression of their doctrines. It is an open and little-discussed question which is the better vision of the role of the philosopher.

Update 1:17 PM: A number of philosophers have expressed variants of this position to me over the years, but Helen De Cruz has reminded me of Regina Rini's articulate expression of some of these ideas in a comment on one of my earlier posts.]

The Experience of Reading: Imagery, Inner Speech, and Seeing the Words on the Page

(by Alan T. Moore and Eric Schwitzgebel)

What do you usually experience when you read?

Some people say that they generally hear the words of the text in their heads, either in their own voice or in the voices of narrator or characters; others say they rarely do this. Some people say they generally form visual images of the scene or ideas depicted; others say they rarely do this. Some people say that when they are deeply enough absorbed in reading, they no longer see the page, instead playing the scene like a movie before their eyes; others say that even when fully absorbed they still always visually experience the words on the page.

Some quotes:

Baars (2003): “Human beings talk to themselves every moment of the waking day. Most readers of this sentence are doing it just now.”

Jaynes (1976): “Right at this moment… as you read, you are not conscious of the letters or even of the words, or even of the syntax or the sentences, or the punctuation, but only of their meaning.”

Titchener (1909): “I instinctively arrange the facts or arguments in some visual pattern [such as] a suggestion of dull red… of angles rather than curves… pretty clearly, the picture of movement along lines, and of neatness or confusion where the moving lines come together.”

Wittgenstein (1946-1948): While reading “I have impressions, see pictures in my mind’s eye, etc. I make the story pass before me like pictures, like a cartoon story.”

Burke (1757): While reading “a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that one in twenty times any such picture is formed.”

Hurlburt (2007): Some people “apparently simply read, comprehending the meaning without images or speech. Melanie’s general view… is that she starts a passage in inner speech and then “takes off” into images.”

Alan and I can find no systematic studies of the issue.

We recruited 414 U.S. mechanical Turk workers to participate in a study on the experience of reading. First we asked them for their general impressions about their own experiences while reading. How often -- on a 1-7 scale from "never" to "half of the time" to "always" -- do they experience visual imagery? Inner speech? The words on the page? (We briefly clarified these terms and gave examples.)

The responses:

[Note: For words on the page, we asked: "How often do you NOT experience the words on the page as you read? Example: your mind is filled with the ideas of the story and not the actual black letters against the white background". We have reversed the scale for presentation here.]

Now, if you're anything like me, you'll be pretty skeptical about the accuracy of these types of self-reports. So Alan and I did several things to try to test for accuracy.

Our general design was to give each person a passage to read, during which they were interrupted with a beep and asked if they were experiencing imagery, inner speech, or the words on the page. Afterwards, we asked comprehension questions, including questions about visual or auditory details of the story or about details of the visual presentation of the material (such as font). Finally, we asked again for participants' general impressions about how regularly they experience imagery, inner speech, and the words on the page when they read.

The comprehension questions were a mixed bag and difficult to interpret -- too much for this blog post (maybe we'll do a follow-up) -- but the other results are striking enough on their own.

Among those who reported "always" experiencing inner speech while they read, only 78% reported inner speech in their one sampled experience. Think a bit about what that means. Despite, presumably, some pressure on participants to conform to their earlier statements about their experience, it took exactly one sampled experience for 22% of those reporting constant inner speech to find an apparent counterexample to their initially expressed opinion. Suppose we had sampled five times, or twenty?

For comparison: 9% of those reporting "always" experiencing visual imagery denied experiencing visual imagery in their one sampled experience. And 42% did the same about visually experiencing the words on the page.

Participants' final reports about their reading experience, too, suggest substantial initial ignorance about their reading experience. The correlations between participants initial and final generalizations about reading experience were .47 for visual imagery, .58 for inner speech, and .37 for experience of words on the page. Such medium-sized correlations are quite modest considering that the questions being correlated are verbatim identical questions about participants' reading experience in general, with an interval of about 5-10 minutes between. One might have thought that if people's general opinions about their experience are well-founded, the experience of reading a single passage should have only a minimal effect on such generalizations.

Three Dimensions of Disagreement about Emotional Experience

William James's view of emotion is famous. Its most famous feature is his claim that emotional experience is entirely bodily:

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind... and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains.... What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins (1890/1950, vol. 2, p. 451-2).

Two other features are less commonly noted. One is that emotional experience is ever-present in rich detail:

Every one of the bodily changes, whosoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods.... Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him (p. 451).

Another is that emotional experience is highly variable:

We should, moreover, find that our descriptions had no absolute truth; that they only applied to the average man; that every one of us, almost, has some personal idiosyncrasy of expression, laughing or sobbing differently from his neighbor, or reddening or growing pale where others do not.... The internal shadings of emotional feeling, moreover, merge endlessly into each other. Language has discriminated some of them, as hatred, antipathy, animosity, dislike, aversion, malice, spite, vengefulness, abhorrence, etc., etc.; but in the dictionaries of synonyms we find these feelings distinguished more by their severally appropriate objective stimuli than by their conscious or subjective tone (p. 447-448).

Disagreement continues, about all three issues.

Some scholars, such as Walter Cannon and Peter Goldie have argued that bodily sensations cannot possibly exhaust emotional experience; but others, such as Antonio Damasio and Jesse Prinz, have defended accounts of emotion that are broadly Jamesian in this respect.

Some scholars, such as John Searle (p. 140) have argued that we have ever-present emotional mood experiences even if they are often fairly neutral, while others, such as Russell Hurlburt and Chris Heavey, have argued that such feeling experiences are only present about 25% of the time on average. (This issue is a dimension of the larger question of how sparse or abundant human conscious experience is in general -- a question I have argued is methodologically fraught.)

I have seen less explicit discussion of how much variability there is in emotional experience between people, but some theories seem to imply that similar emotions will tend to have similar experiential cores: Keith Oatley and P.N. Johnson-Laird, for example, seem to think that each type of emotion -- e.g., anxiety, anger, disgust -- has a "distinctive phenomenological tone" (p. 34); and Goldie, while in some places emphasizing the complex variability of emotion, in other places (as in the article linked above), seems to imply that there's a distinctive qualitative character that an emotion like fear has which one cannot know unless one has experienced that emotion type. Hurlburt, in contrast, holds that people's emotional experiences are highly variable with no common core among them (e.g., here, p. 187, Box 8.8).

For all the work on emotion that has been done in the past 120 years, we are still pretty far, I think, from reaching a well-justified consensus opinion on these questions. Such is the enduring infancy of consciousness studies.

Last Janitor of the Divine

In which the last human on Earth attempts to understand the computer into which everyone has supposedly uploaded...

here.

Readers familiar with John Searle's skepticism about artificial intelligence will see his influence on the story.

Do Ethics Classes Influence Students' Moral Behavior?

Do university ethics classes actually have any practical effect on students' moral behavior outside of a university classroom or laboratory? Basically, we have no idea. I don't believe there is a single published empirical study on the issue. (If I'm wrong, let me know!)

We can make an empirically-informed best guess, though. Here's how: Look at the literature that examines the influence of ethics classes on students' self-reported moral attitudes. If there's a large effect of ethics instruction on student attitudes, maybe it's reasonable to conclude that there would be a moderate effect on student behavior. If there's a medium-sized effect on student attitudes, maybe conclude that there's a small effect on student behavior. Ethics classes work directly on students' attitudes and only indirectly on student behavior outside the classroom. Whatever effect business ethics courses have, for example, on students' tendency to verbally endorse mottoes like "it's bad to pad expense accounts", presumably the effect on behavior will be substantially smaller.

So what does the existing literature on ethics instruction suggest?

The research literature suggests that university ethics classes have at most a small, short-term effect on students' verbally espoused attitudes. This is so even when the researchers seem almost to be begging students to confirm their hypotheses -- for example, by giving before-and-after attitude questionnaires close to the topics of the classes the researchers are teaching (see, e.g., these two studies, among the most-cited recent empirical studies on ethics instruction).

Given the small and inconsistent short-term effects of ethics instruction on student attitudes, I suggest that in the absence of direct evidence it is reasonable to tentatively conclude that the long-term effects on students' attitudes are tiny to non-existent, that the short-term effect on students' practical behavior outside the university setting are tiny to non-existent, and that the long-term effects on practical behavior, if any, are smaller still.

Nor do I find it entirely clear that whatever tiny long-term effects the typical ethics class has on student behavior would be overall positive. Maybe for every positive change in one student's long-term conduct, there's a negative change in another student -- through associating intellectual ethical discourse with that horrible class in which she got a D, or through learning that one can always concoct some theory to rationalize attractive misconduct, or through reinforcing a pre-existing tendency to be a sophomoric know-it-all. Ethics professors don't seem to behave any better as a result of their familiarity with the university ethics curriculum; so why should students?

[For more on this topic, see my new full-length paper here.]

On Creative Unproductivity

A terrific post today on New APPS, from the always-interesting Helen De Cruz, on the value of unstructured time for academic creativity.

I tell my students: Spend half your time reading what everyone else is reading, and spend half your time reading what no one else is reading (Icelandic folk stories, in De Cruz's example). For the latter especially, trust your dorky sense of fun, not some crabbed and conventional notion of what is productive. It will broaden and energize you, and unexpected avenues will open.

What a Non-Effect Looks Like

(and what's wrong with the typical meta-analysis)

I've been reading the literature on whether business ethics classes have any effect on student attitudes. The literature has several features that I've come to associate with non-effects in psychology. Another literature like this is the literature attempting to find objective behavioral correlates of the subjective reports of imagery experiences. The same holds for the literature on the relationship between religiosity and moral behavior and the literature on the psychological significance of colored dreaming (back when people thought they mostly dreamed in black and white).

However, the typical review article or quantitative meta-analysis in these fields does not conclude that there is no effect. Below, I'll discuss why.

The features are:

(1.) A majority of studies show the predicted positive effects, but a substantial minority of studies (maybe a third) show no statistically significant effect.

(2.) The studies showing positive vs. negative effects don't fit into a clearly interpretable pattern -- e.g., it's not like the studies looking for X result almost all show effects while those looking for Y result do not.

(3.) Researchers reporting positive effects often use multiple measures or populations and the effect is found only for some of those measures or populations (e.g., for women but not men, for high-IQ subjects but not for low-IQ subjects, by measure A but not by measure B) -- but again not in a way that appears to replicate across studies or to have been antecedently predicted.

(4.) Little of the research involves random assignment and confounding factors readily suggest themselves (e.g., maybe participants with a certain personality or set of interests are both more likely to have taken a business ethics class and less likely to cheat in a laboratory study of cheating, an association really better explained by those unmeasured differences in personality or interest rather than by the fact that business ethics instruction is highly effective in reducing cheating).

(5.) Much of the research is done in a way that seems almost to beg the participants to confirm the hypothesis (e.g., participants are asked to report their general imagery vividness and then they are given a visual imagery task that is a transparent attempt to confirm their claims of high or low imagery vividness; or a business ethics professor asks her students to rate the wrongness of various moral scenarios, then teaches a semester's worth of classes, then asks those same students to rate the wrongness of those same moral scenarios).

(6.) There is a positive hypothesis that researchers in the area are likely to find attractive, with no equally attractive negative hypothesis (e.g., that subjective reports of imagery correlate with objective measures of imagery; or that business ethics instruction of the sort the researcher favors leads students to adopt more ethical attitudes).

The really striking thing to me about these literatures is that despite what seems likely some pretty strong positive-effect biases (features 4-6), still researchers in these areas struggle to show a consistent pattern of statistical significance.

In my mind this is the picture of a non-effect.

The typical meta-analysis will report a real effect, I think, for two reasons, one mathematical and one sociological. Mathematically, if you combine one-third null-effect studies with two-thirds positive-effect studies, you'll typically find a statistically significant effect (even with the typical "file-drawer" corrections). And sociologically, these reviews are conducted by researchers in the field, often including their own work and the work of their friends and colleagues. And who wants to devalue the work in their own little academic niche? See, for example, this meta-analysis of the business ethics literature and this one of the imagery literature.

In a way, the mathematical conclusion of such meta-analyses is correct. There is a mathematically discoverable non-chance effect underneath the patterns of findings -- the combined effects of experimenter bias, participants' tendency to confirm hypotheses they suspect the researcher is looking for, and unmeasured confounding variables that often enough align positively for positively-biased researchers to unwittingly take advantage of them. But of course, that's not the sort of positive relationship that researchers in the field are attempting to show.

For fun (my version of fun!) I did a little mock-up Monte Carlo simulation. I ran 10,000 sample experiments predicting a randomly distributed Y from a randomly distributed X, with 60 participants in each control group and 60 in each treatment group, adding two types of distortion: First, two small uncontrolled confounds in random directions (average absolute value of correlation, r = .08), and second a similarly small random positive correlation to model some positive-effect bias. (Both X and Y were normally distributed with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. The confounding correlation coefficients were chosen by randomly selecting r from a normal distribution centered at 0 with a standard deviation of 0.1; for the one positive-bias correlation, I took the absolute value.)

Even with only these three weak confounds, not all positive, and fairly low statistical power, 23% of experiments had statistically significant results at a two-tailed p value of < .05 (excluding the 5% in which the control group correlation was significant by chance). If we assume that each researcher conducts four independent tests of the hypothesis, of which only the "best", i.e., most positive, correlation is pursued and emphasized as the "money" result in publication, then 65% of researchers will report a statistically significant positive result, the average "money" correlation will be r = .28 (approaching "medium" size), and no researcher will emphasize in publication a statistically significant negative result.

Yeah, that's about the look of it.

(Slightly revised 10:35 AM.)

Update August 8th:

The Monte Carlo analysis finds 4% with a significantly negative effect. My wife asks: Wouldn't researchers publish those effects too, and not just go for the strongest positive effect? I think not, in most cases. If the effect is due to a large negative uncontrolled confound, a positive-biased researcher, prompted by the weird result, might search for negative confounds that explain the result, then rerun the experiment in a different way that avoids those hypothetized confounds, writing off the first as a quirky finding due to bad method. If the negative effect is due to chance, the positive-biased author or journal referee, seeing (say) p = .03 in the unpredicted direction, might want to confirm the "weird result" by running a follow-up -- and being due to chance it will likely be unconfirmed and the paper unpublished.

Schoenfeld and Ioannidis: Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review

Okay, I'm now officially a John Ioannidis fanboy.

You might have heard of Ioannidis. In 2005 he published the notorious and elegant "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False". But what he has been up to recently, I wondered, and went to his homepage. Just reading the titles and abstracts of his recent publications was a pleasure for a nerdy, stats-loving skeptic like me!

Let me share just one: Schoenfeld and Ioannidis 2013: "Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review". Schoenfeld and Ioannidis chose recipes at random from a recent cookbook and compiled a list of 50 ingredients used in those recipes (almonds, bacon, baking soda, bay leaf, beef, bread, butter, carrot, celery...). Then they searched the medical literature for evidence that the selected ingredients were associated with cancer. For 40 of the 50 ingredients, there was at least one study. 39% of published studies concluded that the ingredient was associated with an increased risk of cancer; 33% concluded a decreased risk; 5% concluded a borderline risk; and only 23% found no evidence of an association. Of the 40 ingredients, 36 had at least one study claiming increased or decreased risk.

Schoenfeld and Ioannidis do not conclude that almost everything we eat either causes or prevents cancer. Rather, they conclude that the methodology and reporting standards in the field are a mess. About half of the ingredients are exonerated in meta-analyses, but Schoenfeld and Ioannidis argue that even meta-analyses might tend to overstate associations given standard practices in the field.

A similar tendency to report spurious positive findings probably distorts psychology (see, e.g., here). Certainly, that has been my own impression when I have systematically reviewed various subliteratures such as those attempting to associate self-reports of visual imagery vividness with performance on visual tasks and attempting to demonstrate the effectiveness of university-level ethics instruction. (I'm currently updating my knowledge of the latter literature -- new post soon, I hope.)

Okay, I can't resist mentioning Ioannidis's delightful piece on grant funding. First sentence: "The research funding system is broken: scientists don't have time for science any more". (I've written about this here and Helen De Cruz has a nice post here.)

Oh, and here he is bashing the use of statistics in neuroscience. I guess I couldn't mention only one study after all. You know, because fanboys lack statistical discipline.

On the Morality of Hypotenuse Walking

As you can infer from the picture below, the groundkeepers at UC Riverside don't like it when we walk on the grass:

But I want to walk on the grass! In time-honored philosophical tradition, then, I will create a moral rationalization. (This is one thing that philosophical training in ethics seems to be especially good for.)

Let's start with the math.

One concrete edge of the site pictured above is (I just measured it) 38 paces; the other edge is 30 paces. Pythagoras tells me that the hypotenuse must be 48 paces -- 20 fewer paces through the grass than on the concrete. At a half-second per pace, the grass walker ought to defeat the concrete walker by 10 seconds.

This particular corner is highly traveled (despite its empty off-hours summer appearance above), standing as it does along the most efficient path from the main student parking lot to the center of campus. There are 21,000 students at UCR. Assuming that on any given weekday 1/10 of them could save time getting to and from their cars by cutting across this grass, and multiplying by 200 weekdays, we can estimate the annual cost of forbidding travel along this hypotenuse at 8,400,000 seconds' worth of walking -- the equivalent of 16 years. Summing similar situations across the whole campus, I find lifetimes' worth of needless footsteps.

The main reason for blocking the hypotenuse is presumably aesthetic. I submit that UCR is acting unreasonably to demand, every year, 16 years' worth of additional walking from its students to prevent the appearance of a footpath along this hypotenuse. Footpaths through grass are simply not that much of an eyesore.

But even granting that unpaved footpaths are a terrible eyesore, the problem could be easily remedied! Suppose it costs $10,000 a year to build and maintain an aesthetically pleasing concrete footpath along the hypotenuse -- at least as pleasing as plain grass (perhaps including even an additional tree or flowers if necessary for aesthetic equivalence). To demand 16 years' needless walking from students to save the campus $10,000 is to value students' time at the unconscionable rate of seven cents an hour.

These calculations don't even take into account UCR's costs of enforcement: The yellow rope itself is an aesthetic crime worse than the footpath it prevents!

In light of UCR's egregious moral and aesthetic choices vis-a-vis footpaths, I am therefore entirely in the right to stride across the grass whenever I see fit. Raise the pitchforks. Fight the power.

But I can't seem to do it while looking a groundskeeper in the eye.

Epictetus on Living One's Philosophy

Today I was reading that grand old Stoic, Epictetus (what else is summer for?), and I was struck by this passage:

Observe yourselves thus in your actions, and you will find of what sect you are. You will find that most of you are Epicureans; a few are Peripatetics, and those without convictions. For by what action will you prove that you think virtue equal, and even superior, to all other things? Show me a Stoic, if you have one. Where? Or how should you? You can show, indeed, a thousand who repeat the Stoic reasonings.... Show me one who is sick, and happy; in danger, and happy; dying, and happy; exiled, and happy; disgraced, and happy. Show him to me; for by heaven! I long to see a Stoic. But you have not one fully developed? Show me then one who is developing; one who is approaching towards this character. Do me this favor. Do not refuse an old man a sight which he has never yet seen (Discourses II.19, Higginson trans.)

I imagine myself his Stoic student, listening to this speech, feeling thoroughly and rightly and personally rebuked.

Although I reject the Stoic value system -- happiness under all conditions seems to me to require a problematic emotional disengagement from the world -- the passage beautifully connects two of my central interests: an approach to belief on which believing something is at least as much a matter of how one lives as a matter of what words come out of your mouth, and a practical, first-person approach to ethics that focuses on self-criticism and self-improvement.

Do Women Have Different Philosophical Intuitions Than Men?

Very interesting critique by at the Brains blog of the original Buckwalter and Stich study on this question.

Ethics in the First Person

Bernard Williams begins his classic Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy with a quote from Plato:

It is not a trivial question, Socrates said: what we are talking about is how one should live (Republic, 352d).

Williams highlights the impersonality of Socrates' question:

"How should one live?" -- the generality of one already stakes a claim. The Greek language does not even give us one: the formula is impersonal. The implication is that something relevant or useful can be said to anyone, in general... (1985, p. 4).

The generality of the question, Williams says, is part of what makes the inquiry philosophical (p. 2).

Williams' thought seems to be that philosophy starts impersonally and then works its way back to the personal question as a particular instance. But I'm inclined to think that to begin with the general question is to set off in the wrong direction. Good philosophy is self-critical -- grounded in a sense of one's own capacities for critique and especially one's limits and biases. Before painting the universe in your philosophical colors, know the shortcomings of your palette.

Yes, these are impersonal considerations for starting with personal reflection -- exactly what is needed to persuade someone inclined to start with the impersonal!

A simple conversion of "How should one live?" to "How should I live?" is one way to go. But to the extent you're moved by the thought that it's best to start with self-critical evaluation, a different type of starting place beckons.

For example: Am I a jerk? If yes, I should probably shut up about how others ought to live and work on myself. Being a jerk is not only a moral failing, but -- in my analysis -- also an epistemic one, a failure properly to appreciate the perspectives of others around you. A jerk ethicist not only is likely to be viewed by others as hypocritical or noxiously self-rationalizing but also works, I suggest, with an epistemic disability likely to taint his conclusions.

If I am part-jerk, then my next thought maybe ought to be whether I'm okay with that; and if I'm not okay with that, what might I do about it -- a very different line of thought, and a very different plan for self-adjustment than is likely to arise from impersonal reflection on how one ought to live. Similarly, I might reflect on: "Am I a loving husband?", "Do I engage in lots of self-serving rationalizations?"

You might object: Such first-personal questions carry presuppositions of exactly the sort philosophers should question, e.g., whether being a loving husband is a good thing to aim for. We should back up and consider the more abstract questions first, such as how ought people live in general. I reply: The answers to these more abstract questions also build in presuppositions, though less visibly to me the less light I shine on my own moral and epistemic failings.

Such first-personal moral epistemology is difficult and uncertain work. If I aim at a critical first-person ethics, I must take a hard look in the mirror, and I must think carefully about the relation between what I think I see and what is really there. I must vividly fear that I am not the person I previously hoped and thought I was.

This is a less pleasant task, I find, than the abstract task of figuring out how everyone in general should live, and a different kind of philosophical ambition.

New Philosophy Journal: Ergo

... here. Open access, triple-blind review, good list of editors. Sounds good to me!

Consider submitting. If the journal gets a good track record of excellent papers early on it could follow the path of Philosophers' Imprint into the upper reaches of philosophy journals. I'd love to see open access journals like this one someday displace journals operated by noxious entities like Springer. So I'm rooting for it and appreciative of the editors for being willing to dedicate their time to a worthwhile enterprise of this sort.

The Individual Differences Reply to Introspective Pessimism

I'm an introspective pessimist: I think people's introspective judgments about their stream of conscious experience are often radically mistaken. This is the topic of my 2011 book, Perplexities of Consciousness. Over the past few years, I've found the most common objection to my work to be what I'll call the Individual Differences Reply.

Many of my arguments depend on what I call the Argument from Variability: Some people report experiences of Type X, others report experience of Type not-X, but it's not plausible that Group 1 and Group 2 differ enough in their underlying stream of experience to make both claims true. Therefore, someone must be mistaken about their experience. So for example: People used to say they dreamed in black and white; now people don't say that; so someone is wrong about their dream experiences. Some people say that tilted coins in some sense look elliptical as though projected upon a 2D visual screen, while others say that visual experience is robustly 3D with no projective distortions at all. Some people say that objects seen 20 degrees from the point of fixation look fairly clear and colorful, while others say objects 20 degrees from center look extremely sketchy and indeterminate of color. Assuming a common underlying experience, disagreement reveals someone to be mistaken. (Fortunately, we needn't settle which is the mistaken party.)

The Individual Differences Reply challenges this assumption of underlying commonality. If people differ in their experience as radically as is suggested by their introspective reports, then no one need be mistaken! Maybe people did really used to dream in black and white and now they dream in color (see Ned Block's comment on a recent Splintered Mind post). Maybe some people really do see tilted coins as elliptical while others do not.

There are two versions of the Individual Difference Reply, which I will call the Stable Differences and the Temporary Differences versions. On the Stable Differences version, people durably differ in their experiences in such a way as to render their reports accurate as generalizations about their experiences. On the Temporary Differences version, people might be similar in their experiences generally, but when faced with the introspective task itself their experience shifts in such a way as to match their reports. For example, maybe everyone generally has similar experiences 20 degrees into the visual periphery, but when asked to introspect their visual experience, some people experience (and accurately report) clarity while others experience (and accurately report) haziness.

People who have pressed versions of the Individual Differences Reply on me include Alsmith forthcoming, Hohwy 2011, Jacovides 2012 and Hurlburt in Hurlburt & Schwitzgebel 2007.)

Here's how I think the dispute should be resolved: Look, on a case-by-case basis, for measurable brain or behavioral differences that tightly correlate with the differences in introspective report and which are plausibly diagnostic of the underlying variability. If those correlations are found, accept that the reports reveal real differences. If not, conclude that at least one party is wrong about their experience.

Consider black and white dreaming. Theoretically, we could hook up brain imagining machinery to people who report black and white dreams and to people who report color dreams. If the latter group shows substantially more neural activity in color-associated neural areas while dreaming, the reports are substantiated. If not, the reports are undermined. Alternatively, examine color term usage in dream narratives: How often do people use terms like "red", "green", etc., in dream diaries? If the rates are different, that supports the existence of difference; if not, that supports the hypothesis of error. In fact, I looked at exactly this in Chapter 1 of Perplexities, and found rates of color-term usage in dream reports to be the same during the peak period of black-and-white dream reporting (USA circa 1950) and recently (USA circa 2000).

Generally, I think the evidence often shows a poor relationship between differences in introspective report and differences in plausibly corresponding behavior or physiology.

Sometimes there is no systematic evidence, but antecedent plausibility considerations suggest against at least the Stable Differences version of the Individual Differences Reply: It seems highly unlikely that the people who report sharp visual experiences 20 degrees into the periphery differ vastly in general visual capacity or visual physiology from those who report highly indeterminate shape and color 20 degrees into the periphery. But that's an empirical question, so test it if you like!

Ethics in the Second Person

Still in China, so just a brief recollection.

When my son Davy was about six or seven, I asked him what the point is in thinking about right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair. He said that most of the kids who talked a lot about things like sharing and fairness seemed to want you to share with them.

We might think of this as "ethics in the second person" -- ethics that focuses on telling the people around you what they are morally required do, with no particular concern about applying the same norms to one's own actions. Of course, ethics in the second person needn't always arise from the motives that drive it in envious six-year-olds! And yet I'm inclined to think that one advantage of hanging around with children is that they reveal to us our vices purer, simpler, and less well disguised.

In China

... and Blogger is hard to access. Trying to work around, but posting and checking comments will be spotty for a couple weeks.

Telepathic Cyborg Rats!

...

It was only a matter of time.

The next step, of course, is aerial transmitters atop our heads which allow direct human brain-to-brain interface without all that slow-paced language business (as envisioned in Churchland 1981).

HT: Nathan Westbrook.

...

Portrayals of Dream Coloration in Mid-Twentieth Century Cinema

From the 1930s-1950s, people in the U.S. thought they dreamed mostly in black and white. Nowadays, people think they dream mostly in color. In previous work, I've presented evidence that this change in opinion was driven by people's over-analogizing dreams to movies -- assuming their dreams are colored if the film media around them are colored, assuming their dreams are black and white if the film media around them are black and white. A few days ago, I summarized my research on this at the Velaslavasay Panorama Museum in L.A., and media scholar Ann-Sophie Lehmann, who was in the audience, raised this question: If people thought they dreamed in black and white in that period, did the cinema of the time tend to portray dreams as black and white?

Here's the idea: If Hollywood directors in the 1930s-1950s thought that dreams were black and white, then color films from that period ought often to portray dream sequences in black and white. This would presumably have been, by the directors' lights, a realistic way to portray dreams, and it would also solve the cinematic problem of how to let the audience know that they're viewing a dream sequence. But that doesn't seem to have been the pattern. In fact, one of the most famous movies of the era actually goes the reverse direction: The Wizard of Oz (1939) portrays Oz in color and Kansas in black and white, and arguably Oz is Dorothy's dream.

I'm not worried about my thesis that people in the U.S. in that era didn't think they dreamed in color -- the evidence is too overwhelming -- but it's interesting that American cinema in that era did not tend to portray dreams as black and white. Why not? Or am I wrong about the cinema of the period? It seems worth a more systematic look. Thoughts? Suggestions?

My Boltzmann Continuants

Lightning strikes me and I die. Fortunately (let's suppose), the universe is infinite and consciousness supervenes on the arrangement of molecules in one's body. So somewhere in my forward light cone -- maybe in about a double-boggle years [note 1], arises an enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuant of me.

A Boltzmann continuant for Person X at time T is, I stipulate, any being that, at time T-prime, arises suddenly from disorganized chaos, into a entity particle-for-particle identical to Person X at time T, within an error range of a thousandth of a Planck length. [note 2] A Boltzmann continuant is enduring just in case it survives in human-like form for at least one day. A Boltzmann continuant is Earthly just in case it exists in an environment that, at time T-prime, is particle-for-particle similar to Earth at T, within a range of 10,000 light years, and obeys the same laws of nature -- except allowing for minor differences in features that had not been observed before time T but would be plausible epistemic possibilities to human observers, such as the unobserved top of a cloud twisting one way rather than another, an unobserved flower in the Sierra being one centimeter to the left, differences in the details of how storms play out on distant planets, etc.

According to mainstream physics (back to Ludwig Boltzmann), there is an extremely tiny but finite chance that such an enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuant of me could arise. So if the universe exists long enough and doesn't settle into some inescapable loop, presumably I will eventually have a Boltzmann continuant.

By hypothesis, my Boltzmann continuant is not killed by the lightning strike; he survives at least one day. Maybe he survives a near miss with lightning. By hypothesis, my Boltzmann continuant will have the same arrangement of molecules in his body at time T-prime as I do at time T; and since the environment is Earthly, presumably things will proceed fairly normally from time T-prime forward, despite the chaos before time T-prime. By hypothesis, consciousness supervenes on the arrangement of molecules, so presumably my Boltzmann continuant will have conscious experiences very much like the ones I would have had if I had not been struck by the lightning. Maybe my continuant will have an episode of thinking to himself something like "Wow, that lightning struck close! I'd better get inside!" [note 3]

Earth is a pretty safe and stable place. So too, then, is continuant-Earth. My continuant returns "home", greets the continuant versions of his family, comes to the continuant version of his office, works on a post for the continuant version of The Splintered Mind. I have no future. He has no past. But we hook together seamlessly into one "Eric Schwitzgebel" with an undetectable double-boggle-year gap between us. Call the entity or quasi-entity composed of these two parts gappy-Eric.

In a way, it would be odd to think it mattered hugely that there is such a gap between these two half-Eric Schwitzgebels. From the inside, gappy-Eric will feel just like he's a continuous, Earthly Eric Schwitzgebel. From the outside, too, at least through the next 10,000 years, no one on continuant-Earth will have cause to suspect a gap in Eric or in the world. Gappy-Eric's family life, his professional life, the whole planet -- all would seem the same, all would seem to continue unabated. Continuant-existence would seem to be survival enough.

Of course, I needn't be struck by lightning for there to be enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuants of me. If we accept the that the universe is infinite, diverse, and subject to Boltzmannian chances, then every time slice of me will have an infinite number of enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuants somewhere in the future. So I needn't fear any early, chancy death: Some appropriate Boltzmann continuant of me will launch at precisely the right subjective moment to continue me seamlessly. Gappy-Eric lives! In some cases, going back a few seconds might be necessary to find an appropriate time T from which my death was not inevitable in any Earthly environment, but it seems like quibbling to think those few seconds make a huge ontological difference.

With infinitely many continuants of me, sprouting off from every moment of my life, whose continuant-bodies on continuant-Earth are for practical purposes as good a continuation of me as is my own body on Earth, maybe I shouldn't care about my individual death at all, in any circumstances -- or rather maybe I should care about it only as the loss of one soldier in an infinite army of me.

Yes, this is entirely bonkers.

[revised Nov. 19, 2014]

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

[note 1]: The number of particles in the observable universe is estimated at about 10^80. Maybe 10^75-ish of those are within 10,000 light years of us. To have enough particles suddenly conform to the structure described in the next paragraph from a previous state of chaos (rather than in some more normal-seeming way) might require a very long time -- longer, perhaps, than the Poincare recurrence time of the observable universe. If 10^100 is a googol and 10^10^100 is a googolplex, let's call a "boggle" 10^10^... [repeated a googolplex times] ...^100. A "double-boggle", then, could be 10^10^... [repeated a boggle times] ...^100. I'm hoping that's big enough.

[note 2]: I assume that differences of less than a thousandth of a Planck length don't matter to consciousness. If necessary, we can narrow the error range. If we use an ontology of fields, presumably an error measure similiar in spirit could be developed. There will also be an issue about temporal spread -- perhaps more serious if consciousness spreads across a specious present. If necessary, there could be a brief period during which consciousness slips into the Boltzmann continuant before full supervenience takes hold.

[note 3]: The question arises whether the continuant's thoughts would have that meaning, if the meaning of words depends on facts about learning history; but given our stipulations, at least the continuant's conscious experience of that episode of inner speech will be like mine would have been, even if it doesn't tack down its reference in the external world in quite the right way.

Invisible Revisions

Imagine an essay manuscript: Version A. Monday morning, I read through Version A. I'm not satisfied. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I revise and revise -- cutting some ideas, adding others, tweaking the phrasing, trying to perfect the manuscript. Wednesday night I have the new version, Version B. My labor is complete. I set it aside.

Three weeks later, I re-read the manuscript -- Version B, of course. It lacks something. The ideas I had made more complex seem now too complex. They lack vigor. Conversely, what I had simplified for Version B now seems flat and cartoonish. The new sentences are clumsy, the old ones better. My first instincts had been right, my second thoughts poor. I change everything back to the way it was, one piece at a time, thoughtfully. Now I have Version C -- word-for-word identical with Version A.

To your eyes, Version A and Version C look the same, but I know them to be vastly different. What was simplistic in Version A is now, in Version C, elegantly simple. What I overlooked in Version A, Version C instead subtly finesses. What was rough prose in Version A is now artfully casual. Every sentence of Version C is deeper and more powerful than in Version A. A journal would rightly reject Version A but rightly accept Version C.

1% Skepticism

I find myself, right now, 99% confident that I am who I think I am, living in a broad world of the kind I think I live in. The remaining 1% of my credence I reserve for all radically skeptical scenarios combined.

Most of us, I think, don't reserve even 1% of our credence for radically skeptical scenarios. Maybe if you're philosophically inclined and not entirely hostile to skepticism, you'd be willing to say, in certain reflective moments, that there is some chance, maybe about 1%, that some radically skeptical scenario obtains. But such acknowledgements are typically not truly felt and lived -- not in any durable way. Skeptical doubts stay in the classroom, in the office, in the books. They don't come home with you.

What if skeptical doubt did come home with you? What would it be like really to live with 1% of your credence distributed among radically skeptical scenarios?

It depends in part on what the scenarios are. Let mention three that I have trouble entirely dispelling.

Random origins skepticism. Most physicists think that there is a finite though tiny chance that a brain or brain and body could randomly congeal from disorganized matter. In a sufficiently large and diverse universe, we should expect this chance sometimes to be realized. A question that then arises is: Are randomly congealed beings relatively more or less common than beings arising from what we think of as the ordinary process of billions of years of biological evolution? A difficult cosmological question! I see room for some doubt about the matter, so it seems I ought to reserve some subjective credence for the possibility that such freak-chance beings are common enough that I might be one of them, and thus that I lack the sort of past, and probably future, that I think I have. (This is the Boltzmann brain hypothesis.)

Simulation skepticism. If it is possible to create consciousness artificially inside computers, then likely it is also possible to create conscious beings with radically false autobiographical memories and radically false impressions about the sort of world they live in. I don't feel I can entirely exclude the possibility that I am such a radically mistaken artificial being -- for example a being limited to a few hours' existence in a 22nd-century child's computer game. (This is a skeptical version of the "simulation" possibility, discussed non-skeptically by Nick Bostrom here and by David Chalmers here.)

Dream skepticism. Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. After he woke he wasn't sure if he was Zhuangzi who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi. I'm inclined to think the phenomenology of dreaming is very different from the phenomenology of waking, and thus that my current experiences are excellent grounds for thinking I am indeed awake. But I am not absolutely sure of that. And if I might be dreaming, then I might not really have the family and career and past life I think I do.

I don't believe that any such skeptical scenario is true, or even very likely. On reflection, I am inclined to grant all such skeptical scenarios combined about 1% of my credence. In a way, that's not much. But in another way, that's quite a bit.

Suppose someone came to me with two ten-sided dice and said this: I will roll these two dice, and if they both come up "1", you will die. Would I rest in gentle confidence that a 99% chance of living is quite an excellent chance? Or suppose I were to learn that seven unnamed students from my daughter's largish elementary school had just been abducted into irrecoverable slavery. Would I feel sorry for those students but feel no real concern about my daughter, since the odds are so good she is not among them?

I sit on by back patio. If some radically skeptical scenario is true, then my daughter does not exist, or I will be dead within a minute as the disorganized soup from which I've congealed consumes me again, or my life will end in an hour when the child grows bored with the game in which I am instantiated. Should I be unconcerned about these possibilities because I judge it to be 99% likely that nothing of this sort is so?

I hear a voice from inside the house. It's my wife. How would it change things if instead of taking it for granted that she exists, I held it to be 99% likely that she exists? -- or 99.5% likely, if I allow a 50% chance of her real existence given a skeptical scenario?

Often, I visually imagine negative events that have a small chance of occurring. This morning, the newspaper told me of five teenagers who died in a street race; I looked at my own teenage son, who was readying for school, imagining his death. Or I'm passenger in an airplane descending through heavy fog and turbulence, and I imagine a crash. I hear of a streak of identity thefts in Riverside, see that someone has messed with our mailbox, and imagine our bank accounts drained. If I am a 1% skeptic, shall I then also imagine the world's suddenly splitting into void, Godzilla's rising over the horizon for the child's entertainment, my suddenly floating off into the air, opening my front door to find no ordinary suburban street but rather Wonderland or darkness?

I have, in fact, started to imagine these things more often. I don't believe them -- no more than I believe the plane will crash. Given non-skepticism, the plane is much less than 1% likely to crash. If I am a 1% skeptic, then I should probably think it more likely that am I Boltzmann brain or a short-lived artificial consciousness or a much-deceived dreamer, than that the plane will crash. Would it be more rational, then, for me to dwell on those possibilities than on the possible plane crash?

I am undecided about doing some chore. I could weed the yard. Or I could sip tea, enjoy the shade, and read Borges. I teeter right on the cusp about which is the wiser choice. But skepticism has not yet crossed my mind. Once it does, the scale is tipped. The 1% chance that the weeds are an illusion or a mere temporary thing -- the small but non-trivial possibility that this moment here is all I have before I die or the world collapses around me or I wake to something entirely new -- favors Borges.

If my credence in the durable reality of this patio and this book were to fall much below 99% -- if my credence were to fall, say, to only 80% or 50%, I would be laid low. My death might well be upon me within minutes. I would seek my family, my seeming-family; at the same time, my doubts would isolate me from them. I could not, I think, feel full proper intimacy while I regard my partner in intimacy as fairly likely to be mere froth or illusion. Even if my wife and children are not froth and illusion, such large doubt is disaster, for it would derange my choices and emotions, and few people would understand my doubts, even if my own careful reflection revealed those doubts to be well-grounded. Everyone around would see me only as insane with foolish philosophy.

1% skepticism does not have this effect though. I can still enjoy my Borges, even flatter myself somewhat with my excellent excuse for avoiding the weeds, which I am of course in fact almost certain do exist.

[For related reflections see Waterfall Skepticism.]

Joshua Afire in Canaan

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. I have written a story about war, two pages from the perspective of Joshua from the Old Testament -- a celebration of violence and genocide, in Joshua's hard, sure voice. I hope it's unnecessary to add that Joshua's perspective is not my own.

Story here.

Developments at the Brains Blog

Readers of the Splintered Mind might be interested in this news about developments at the Brains blog, including regular symposia on articles from the journal Mind & Language, a new series of podcasts by Adam Shriver, and a stint as Brains Featured Scholar by former Splintered Mind guest blogger Lisa Bortolotti.

Sounds fun to me!

Is Crazyism Obvious?

"Crazyism" about the metaphysics of mind, as I define it, is the view that something bizarre and undeserving of credence must be among the core truths about the mind. In my central article on the topic, I develop the view by defending two subordinate theses: universal bizarreness and universal dubiety.

Univeral bizarreness is the view that well-developed metaphysical approaches to the mind will inevitably conflict sharply with common sense. My defense of universal bizarreness turns on the failure of any contemporary or historical philosopher to develop a thoroughly commonsensical metaphysics of mind. That empirical fact about the history of philosophy is best explained, I think, by the incoherence of common sense in matters of mental metaphysics. If commonsense is incoherent, no broad-reaching coherent metaphysical system could respect it all.

Universal dubiety is the view that all of the broad approaches to the metaphysics of mind -- materialism, dualism, idealism, or some rejection or compromise alternative -- are dubious, none warranting credence much above 50%. My defense of universal dubiety turns on the apparent inability of any combination of empirical scientific, abstract theoretical, or commonsensical methods, in anything like their current state, to resolve fundamental metaphysical questions of this sort.

The most common objection I hear to crazyism is that it's obvious. I am somewhat puzzled by this objection!

Is it obvious that all coherent, well-developed approaches to the metaphysics of mind conflict with common sense? Perhaps that was Kant’s view, especially in the antimonies, but Kant’s view of the antimonies is not universally accepted. Scientifically oriented materialists often reject common sense, but doing so is entirely consistent with thinking that there might be a commonsensical way of to develop dualism. Also, it remains common argumentative practice in the metaphysics of mind to highlight sharp violations of common sense in views one opposes – idealism, panpsychism, Chinese-nation functionalism, eliminative materialism – as though the bizarreness of those views were a powerful consideration against them. This practice seems problematic if it is generally agreed that all well-developed metaphysical theories sharply violate common sense.

Is it obvious that no existing combination of methods could, within the next several decades – within our active philosophical lifetimes – appropriately push us to a warranted belief (or credence much above 50%) in materialism or whatever option might usurp materialism’s current popularity in the philosophical community? This doesn’t seem to be the attitude of most of my materialist friends. Indeed, even other skeptics about our ability to solve the mind-body problem, such as Colin McGinn and Noam Chomsky, seem to assume a broadly naturalistic, scientific perspective toward the world, excluding from outset such options as idealism and substance dualism.

Finally, it's odd that the supposed obviousness of crazyism is offered as an objection to my work on the topic. Even if the view I am espousing is just boringly obvious to well-informed philosophers, it might still be worth gathering and presenting the considerations in favor of it, if (as I believe), it hasn't properly been done before. But I am eagerly open to reading suggestions on this last point!

Tree

Driving her son to school, she saw the perfect tree. The perfect tree stood small and twisted upon the center divider. It commanded its cousins, suburbanly spaced along the same divider. It commanded the giant eucalyptuses that lined the old road. It was centerpoint of a universe of weeds and flowers, cars and houses, birds, beetles, clouds, dust, stone, gutters, children, and crumpled paper. She drove over the small lip of the road onto the sidewalk and the dead leaves, parking. Her son asked was something wrong? She opened her door, walked across onto the median, and sat in the dirt, facing the tree.

Her son followed but did not understand. After a while, he walked toward school.

That afternoon, the phone rang in her car. That afternoon, she received a parking ticket. That evening, her husband came and sat with her beneath the tree. He said some words that seemed like gentle pleading. He left, he came back, he fell asleep at her feet while she sat.

Dawn speared through the eucalyptus, painting patches on the perfect tree. The perfect tree had a thousand red elbows. The perfect tree offered the world its berries, its light, its air, its scent of apple, of dust, chocolate, rubber, marjoram, closet floors. Its leaves were a chaos on which it would be impossible to improve. She breathed the oxygen of its photosynthesis. She drew a finger across a branch, leaving an invisible trace of her skin’s oil. Her husband brought breakfast, cancelled her classes, defended her rights against the police. A friend drove her car away.

.... [For the full-length and updated version, please email me.

What Are You Noticing When You Adjust Your Binoculars?

Maja Spener has written an interesting critique of my 2011 book, Perplexities of Consciousness, for a forthcoming book symposium at Philosophical Studies. My book is an extended argument that people have very poor knowledge of their own conscious experience, even of what one might have thought would be fairly obvious-seeming features of their currently ongoing experience (such as whether it is sparse or full of abundant detail, whether it is visually doubled, whether they have pervasive auditory experience of the silent surfaces around them). Maja argues that we have good introspective knowledge in at least one class of cases: cases in which our skillful negotiation with the world depends on what she calls "introspection-reliant abilities".

Maja provides examples of two such introspection-reliant abilities: choosing the right amount of food to order at a restaurant (which relies on knowledge of how hungry you feel) and adjusting binoculars (which relies on knowing how blurry the target objects look).

Let's consider, then, Maja's binoculars. What, exactly, are you noticing when you adjust your binoculars?

Consider other cases of optical reflection and refraction. I see an oar half-submerged in water. In some sense, maybe, it "looks bent". Is this a judgment about my visual experience of the oar or instead a judgment about the optical structure of my environment? -- or a bit of both? How about when I view myself in the bathroom mirror? Normally during my morning routine, I seem to be reaching judgments primarily about my body and secondarily about the mirror, and hardly at all about my visual experience. (At least, not unless we accept some kind of introspective foundationalism on which all judgments about the outside world are grounded on prior judgments about experience.) Or suppose I'm just out of the shower and the mirror is foggy; in this case my primary judgment seems to concern neither my body nor my visual experience but rather the state of the mirror. Similarly, perhaps, if the mirror is warped -- or if I am looking through a warped window, or a fisheye lens, or using a maladjusted review mirror at night, or looking in a carnival mirror.

If I can reach such judgments directly without antecedent judgments about my visual experience, perhaps analogously in the binoculars case? Or is there maybe instead some interaction among phenomenal judgments about experience and optical or objectual judgments, or some indeterminacy about what sort of judgment it really is? We can create, I'm inclined to think, a garden path between the normal bathroom mirror case (seemingly not an introspective judgment about visual experience) and the blurry binoculars case (seemingly an introspective judgment about visual experience), going either direction, and thus into self-contradiction. (For related cases feeding related worries see my essay in draft The Problem of Known Illusion and the Resemblance of Experience to Reality.)

Another avenue of resistance to the binoculars case might be this. Suppose I'm looking at a picture on a rather dodgy computer monitor and it looks too blue, so I blame the monitor and change the settings. Arguably, I could have done this without introspection: I reach a normal, non-introspective visual judgment that the picture of the baby seal is tinted blue. But I know that baby seals are white. So I blame the monitor and adjust. Or maybe I have a real baby seal in a room with dubious, theatrical lighting. I reach a normal visual assessment of the seal as tinted blue, so I know the lighting much be off and I ask the lighting techs to adjust. Similarly perhaps, then, if I gaze at a real baby seal through blurry binoculars: I reach a normal, non-introspective judgment of the baby seal as blurry-edged. But I know that baby seals have sharp edges. So I blame the binoculars and adjust. Need this be introspective at all, need it concern visual experience at all?

In the same way, maybe, I see spears of light spiking out of streetlamps at night -- an illusion, some imperfection of my eyes or eyewear. When I know I am being betrayed by optics, am I necessarily introspecting, or might I just be correcting my normal non-introspective visual assessments?

This is a nest of issues I am struggling with, making less progress than I would like. Maybe Maja is right, then. But if so, it will take further work to show.

SarahAbraham

Through a harmony of dendrites, Sarah came to feel touch upon Abraham’s skin. They were waltzing upon the beach, Ishbak on the immutable piano, and a frond brushed Abraham’s back. Sarah felt the frond as though on her own back. She caressed Abraham’s left shoulder and felt the caress as though upon her own shoulder. Abraham’s right hand was touching the skin under Sarah’s arm, and Sarah felt not only his fingers there in the usual way, but also a new complement: the smoothness of her ribs upon her own right hand. She had been feeling that smoothness for a while, she realized, intermingled with the more familiar touch of Abraham’s left hand upon her right as they danced.

They danced three songs in this manner, then lay together upon the sand. Sarah touched the back of her neck with a twig and saw Abraham scratch his own neck. They made love in a new way.

Sarah gazed upon Abraham as he observed the sky. She called to Ishbak and Midian. Sarah and Abraham lay face down upon blankets while the sons of Keturah touched their backs, and Sarah learned to distinguish Abraham’s sensations from her own. She now had two backs, two bodies.

Through a harmony of retinas, Sarah came to see through Abraham’s eyes. At first, it was a faint tint upon her field of view – her own form, maybe, bent toward the fire pit, as Abraham watched her from the side, her figure like a wraith upon the fire that she more vividly saw. The wraith was jumpy, unpredictable; she could not fully guess Abraham’s saccades as his eyes gathered the scene. Over days, the visions livened and settled. Sarah did not know if she merely learned better to anticipate Abraham’s eye movements or if she instead also gained partial control.

[for the second half of this story, email me at eschwitz at domain: ucr.edu]

Two Types of Hallucination

Oliver Sacks is one of the great essayists of our time. I have just finished his book Hallucinations.

Sacks does not, I think, adequately distinguish two types of hallucination. I will call them doxastic and phenomenal. In a phenomenal hallucination of A, one has sensory experience as of A. In a doxastic hallucination, one thinks one has sensory experience as of A. The two can come apart.

Consider this description, from page 99 of Hallucinations (and attributed to Daniel Breslaw via David Ebin's book The Drug Experience).

The heavens above me, a night sky spangled with eyes of flame, dissolve into the most overpowering array of colors I have ever seen or imagined; many of the colors are entirely new -- areas of the spectrum which I seem to have hitherto overlooked. The colors do not stand still, but move and flow in every direction; my field of vision is a mosaic of unbelievable complexity. To reproduce an instant of it would involve years of labor, that is, if one were able to reproduce colors of equivalent brilliance and intensity.

Here are two ways in which you might come to believe the above about your experience: (1.) You might actually have visual experiences of the sort described, including of colors entirely new and previously unimagined and of a complexity that would require years of labor to describe. Or (2.) you might shortcut all that and simply arrive straightaway at the belief that you are undergoing or have undergone such an experience -- perhaps with the aid of some unusual visual experiences, but not really of the novelty and complexity described. If the former, you have phenomenally hallucinated wholly novel colors. If the latter, you have merely doxastically hallucinated them.

The difference seems important -- crucial even, if we are going to understand the boundaries of experience as revealed by hallucination. And yet phenomenal vs. merely doxastic hallucinations might be hard to distinguish on the basis of verbal report alone, and almost by definition subjects will be apt to confuse the two. I can recall no point in the book where Sacks displays sensitivity to this issue.

Once I was attuned to it, the issue nagged at me again and again in reading:

Time was immensely distended. The elevator descended, "passing a floor every hundred years" (p. 100).

Then my whole life flashed in my mind from birth to the present, with every detail that ever happened, every feeling and thought, visual and emotional was there in an instant (p. 102).

I have had musical hallucinations (when taking chloral hydrate as a sleeping aid) which were continuations of dream music into the waking state -- once with a Mozart quintet. My normal musical memory and imagery is not that strong -- I am quite incapable of hearing every instrument in a quintet, let alone an orchestra -- so the experience of hearing the Mozart, hearing every instrument, was a startling (and beautiful) one (p. 213).

The possibility of merely doxastic hallucination might arise especially acutely when subjects report highly unusual, almost inconceivable, experiences or incredible detail beyond normal perception and imagery; but of course the possibility is present in more mundane hallucination reports too.

(A fan of Dennett might suggest that there's no difference between the phenomenal and doxastic hallucinations; but I don't know what Dennett himself would say -- probably something more complex than that.)