The Envy Argument Against the View That Teletransportation Is Death

Oh how mistaken other philosophers are! I was especially struck by this poll result in the just-dropped Bourget and Chalmers study of professional philosophers' opinions:

Teletransporter (new matter)

Survival 35.2%
Death 40.1%
Accept an alternative view 1.8%
The question is too unclear to answer 4.8%
There is no fact of the matter 7.5%
Agnostic/undecided 10.1%
Other 0.6%

Unpacking the terse formulation: In the standard teletransporter scenario (made prominent in philosophy by Derek Parfit), a person walks into a machine that scans their body molecule-for-molecule, destroying it in the process. The machine beams all that information to a distant planet. On the distant planet, a molecule-for-molecule identical copy of the original person's body is constructed from local materials. The created entity walks out of the machine, acting just like the original person, having apparent memories of that person's childhood on Earth, continuing that person's plans, saying "oh, the transportation didn't hurt at all", and so on.

The question is: Is that person on the distant planet just a replica of the original person, who died when their original Earthly body was destroyed, or is this -- as advertised -- really just a form of (non-lethal) transportation?

To get a sense of why a philosopher might say "no, it's death", consider the case in which information is sent to two planets and two new bodies are made. Since those two are different people, in different locations, they can't both be identical to the original person on Earth; so therefore -- the thinking goes -- neither is identical. But if neither is identical to the original in the doubling case, neither is identical to the original in the standard case, since whether someone is you shouldn't depend on whether a distant duplicate has been created. (Would the person on Mars have to wait for news from Venus to know if they survived?) Alternatively, consider a non-destructive scanning process. The undestroyed person on Earth would presumably still fear death from local causes even if a duplicate exists on Mars.

Right, so "teleportation is death" is not an outrageous answer -- I can see how someone might feel forced to accept that view. But still. Haven't these people seen Star Trek?! (Okay, Star Trek transporters might transmit atoms and not just information, but even the writers don't seem to have been entirely clear about that, and there are duplication problems anyway.)

[image of duplicate Rikers from Star Trek: The Next Generation]

In further defense of the view that teletransportation need not be death, let me offer the Envy Argument.

Imagine a world in which teleporters are commonplace and extremely well-functioning. No one is ever lost or doubled. The entities who walk out on the far side are healthy and qualitatively identical to those who walked in, to as high a degree of precision as anyone could possibly care about. There are no half-killed, dying people staggering out of the input side of the transporter. And so on.

Now imagine that you are an old-fashioned philosopher who refuses to enter one of these devices: "It's death!" you say. "The person who walks out on the other side is only a duplicate! I'll never step into one of those so-called 'transporter' death machines. It's all a grievous metaphysical error!"

Your friends pooh-pooh you. One pops into a transporter, her duplicate has a nice little vacation on Mars, the duplicate on Mars then steps into a transporter, and another duplicate emerges on Earth. "It's me, Gabrielle!" she says, striding up to you. "I had such a splendid time on Mars. You really should go someday!"

"Oh, you're not Gabrielle," you reply. "Gabrielle died when she stepped into the 'transporter'. I'm in mourning her now. You are just a duplicate of a duplicate of her."

Gabrielle-duplicate-2 notices your mourner's attire. "No, no," she says, "I really am Gabrielle! See me. Take my hand. I remember that time we [insert your secretest of secrets]".

"Of course that's what a Gabrielle duplicate would say," you reply, sadly. "The duplication process is so perfect! Understand that I have nothing against you. I'm sure you're every bit as wonderful as my deceased friend."

You part ways. Maybe you befriend Gabrielle-duplicate-2 (so very similar to your deceased friend) or maybe the memory of Gabrielle is too painful.

Suppose that teleportation, so-called, becomes even more common -- a fast, economical alternative to jet travel. Maybe it costs $100. (Organic materials are cheap and there are economies of scale; maybe it's also subsidized by the government because it is energy efficient.) Your friends and colleagues teleport to Europe and back, to New York and back, bopping around. You follow slowly and painfully behind, sometimes, in planes. Increasingly, though, plane travel becomes a rare and expensive novelty. You can no longer afford it. People pity you for your old-fashioned ways. For $100, you could see China, Naples, Venus, Mars, the rings of Saturn!

You'll envy them, of course. You'll try to pity them. "Of course, they're all dead, or will be soon, as soon as they take the next 'teleporter trip'. Such pitifully short lives they have. It's sad!" Your heart will not be in this as you say it, though. Their perspective, the experiences they relate, their obvious joy and unconcern, will be too powerfully vivid for you to sustain your metaphysically manufactured pity for any length of time.

Eventually, you'll hop in a teleporter yourself. Maybe part of you will even think it is suicide to do so; but if so, maybe not such a bad suicide? Once you emerge on the other end, you'll think thoughts like "Yesterday, I..." and "When I was a child, I...". Part of you will correct yourself: "That's not correct. I was manufactured just recently!" But it will be hard not to have such self-refential thoughts about the past, and everyone else speaks that way. It will be far more practical to just go along with that way of thinking.

If a few stubborn old metaphysicians are never converted, eventually they'll die off -- like people who used to refuse to be photographed on the grounds that photographs steal away one's soul. Could the anti-photographers have been correct? Does everyone's first baby picture steal away their soul, though no one notices? It makes approximately as much sense to stubbornly insist on to the teleportation-is-death view in the society I've imagined.

If this view makes the metaphysics of survival and personal identity partly about what people think constitutes personal identity and survival -- yes, yes, precisely so!

University of California Has Endorsed the "Principles for Online Majors and Programs" That I Co-Authored

I have now been serving for a year on the University of California Systemwide Committee on Educational Policy.  One of the committee's first tasks last fall was to begin drafting up principles governing the approval and implementation of online undergraduate majors and programs.  This is such an important issue for the future, and the chance to help shape policy for the world's leading public university system seemed like exactly the point of serving on a committee of this sort, so I volunteered to take the lead in drafting the recommendations, along with Manoj Kaplinghat of UC Irvine.

After almost a year of drafts, revisions, feedback, and consultations, the final set of recommendations was approved by UC's Academic Council and made public.  Here it is!  I hope that it proves useful not only across the University of California but also for other universities confronting the issue of how to evaluate proposed online majors.

Two broad principles guided my thinking in drafting up these recommendations.

First, we should be looking not only for equality of opportunity but also for equality of outcome.  Online students might, in principle, have the same opportunity to, say, meet with professors about research or engage in academic discussions with peers, if they go the extra mile to make it work; but unless the academic program is set up so that students actually take advantage of those opportunities at rates similar to students in comparable in-person programs, online programs will in fact be of inferior quality.

Second, we should think broadly about what aspects of university life make in-person programs valuable -- not only performance on tests but also personal engagement with instructors and peers, student activities, opportunities for research, access to career resources, advising, informal interactions, and access to academic tools and resources.  Students who perform reasonably well on academic tests but lack these other aspects of university life are not receiving a comparable education to in-person students.

The public version of the document is available here.  Below the break is the same document formatted as a blog post.

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UCEP Recommendations for Online Undergraduate Majors and Programs

During the 2022/23 academic year, members of UCEP discussed and developed a set of values essential to provide a rigorous education in an environment that benefits from new online technologies.  Ongoing budget cuts and the development of billion-dollar industries devoted to helping students cheat [1] present significant challenges to all modes of education. Although the concepts described here are provided in the context of newly developing online majors, it is important to note that these principles apply equally to in-person degree programs that use online tools.  As courses increasingly become blended with assignments and exams administered electronically and hybrid degree programs develop to include online courses, faculty and administrators should be proactive in adapting new technologies in ways that ensure rigor, engagement, and academic integrity.

A. PRINCIPLES FOR ONLINE MAJORS AND PROGRAMS

Engagement.  The coursework to fulfill the major requirements and the interactions of students with their peers and faculty are some of the most important and defining educational experiences for a bachelor’s degree candidate. Students in online majors must engage with their peers and faculty in ways that are comparable to what exists in traditional majors. The 2020 Online Undergraduate Degree Program (OUDP) task force report [2] and a subsequent study by UCEP in 2022 [3] highlighted that the engagement of students with research-active faculty is a critical component of UC instruction and degrees, and this must play a central role in the design and implementation of online majors. The UCEP study also noted that small class size correlates with better outcomes.  Small classes offer the benefit of increased opportunities for student/faculty interaction compared to large classes.  The most successful online degree programs maintain a class size of fewer than 50 students per faculty member (see US Dept of Education College Scorecard [4] and US News rankings [5]). It is also important to note that if the interaction between instructors and students is limited, is not regular and substantive, and is primarily initiated by the student, then such a program would not meet the requirements of a distance education program as outlined by the Accreditation Agency WSCUC Substantive Change Manual [6], based on Federal Regulations [7].

Online assessment.  Assessment is key to maintaining the quality of instruction.  Assessing student learning online in a robust manner is a subject of great debate. Coursework should allow students to demonstrate mastery of concepts, not simply their ability to copy from the internet.  It is possible for online assessments (e.g., proctored online exams) to be carried out with limited occurrences of academic dishonesty but the measures required are expensive and often risk violating student privacy (e.g., third party software, surveillance, and room inspections ruled unconstitutional [8]). In addition, not all students have the same physical space, privacy, or equipment, which makes synchronous, proctored online assessment an inherently inequitable method. Meeting these challenges may require new modes of assessment that could minimize cheating (in-person exam rooms, use of test question banks to prevent student teams from sharing answers, shorter and more frequent quizzes, open book exams, open-ended papers; etc.). It will require more resources and a concerted effort at each campus and perhaps even systemwide.

Equity.  Studies of online degree programs have shown mixed results [9].  Although some studies have shown improvements in time to degree with the addition of online courses to in-person degree programs, degree completion rates for fully online programs and learning outcomes of online courses remain a concern.  The Public Policy Institute of California studied one million online courses [10].  They found a significant performance gap: “younger students, African Americans, Latinos, males, students with lower levels of academic skill, and part-time students are all likely to perform markedly worse in online courses than in traditional ones…. The gap is largest for Latino and African American students (15.9 and 17.9 percentage points, respectively).”  Students from under-resourced backgrounds may have their own set of challenges with online education, which should be taken into account when designing an online major.  It is important for online major programs to ensure that all their students can engage online (good laptops, peripherals, and internet connectivity).  An additional concern is the potential creation of two classes of students: one in-person (privileged) group and one online (second-class) group who might be working toward the same degree.  Finally, online courses should allow for face-to-face interactions within a diverse population of students; this is important in challenging biases that students might have when entering the university.  

Quality.  Students in online programs should have the same quality of instruction, advising, engagement with peers and program faculty, and support services as others in traditional majors.  Beyond providing the same opportunities, online programs should be designed to ensure that the outcomes in terms of educational goals, research goals, and career placement for their students are equivalent to those in closely related in-person programs.  Online programs should not be seen as something inferior by students, faculty, and the outside community.  For this purpose, the design and implementation of the online programs must prioritize and emphasize the high quality of education and multi-varied experiences (peer interactions, learning communities, research, interactions with faculty, etc.) that will be available to their students. 

Based on the issues centered around engagement, assessment, quality and equity, we advocate the following principles for the design of online majors and other online programs.

1.     All instruction must provide a high level of rigor and academic integrity in meeting learning goals, examinations, assessments, and program outcomes.  The learning goals for the courses and the expected program outcomes should inform the online format for the program.  Admission requirements to graduate programs should also be considered in designing the curriculum (for example, a recent survey found that 41% of Medical Schools would not accept an undergraduate online course toward their required courses [11]).

2.     Programs offering online instruction should ensure that students have the same level of engagement with instructors, including research-active faculty, as in other closely related in-person programs.   

3.     Online instruction should be designed so that students will have similar levels of involvement in scholarship and research with faculty members in the program and complete projects of similar quality as students in other closely related in-person programs.   

4.     Online instruction should be designed to ensure that students interact with each other to the same extent as students in similar in-person programs to build a sense of belonging (for example, through peer mentoring and study groups).  Students should be able to participate in student societies that exist on campus and have the same opportunities to live on campus, if they choose to do so.  The ability to live on campus is particularly important to enable the undergraduate research needed for admission to many graduate programs.

5.     Students in online programs should have similar access to trained counselors as other students in in-person programs within the same school or college.  Programs should have a comprehensive and equitable plan for student advising and remediation.   

6.     Students in an online program should be eligible for the same level of financial aid as in-person students.  They should be able to get timely career advice and have access to job fairs conducted on campus.

7.     Programs should ensure that their students have equitable access to tools to connect and learn in an online environment.  They should provide administrative support to students at the same level as they do for in-person programs.  They should plan to provide support to instructors regarding technology issues related to teaching and learning online.   

8.     Graduation rates of students in online programs are expected to be equivalent to similar in-person programs, and students in an online program should be able to transfer to other majors or add minors in the same way as they would have if they were in an in-person major.

9.     Programs should plan for systematic collection of data to assess the program outcomes of the online programs, addressing all the principles above.  Peer review of online courses is highly recommended in addition to student evaluations.

10.   Admissions requirements to online programs should not be lower than admissions requirements to in-person programs.  Online students should be UC quality students ready to handle demanding UC quality instruction.

 

B. EVALUATING PROPOSALS FOR NEW DISTANCE EDUCATION PROGRAMS 

Both the Accreditation Commission (WSCUC) and Federal Regulations maintain requirements that are specific to Online courses (defined as 50% or more instruction online).  For this reason, it is recommended that UC Divisions track their online course offerings including the engagement activities in those courses.

Accreditation of the University to educate students in California is performed by the Western Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC; formerly WASC).  They define an online course as one where 50% or more of instruction/interaction is online [6].  Online courses must “support regular and substantive interaction between the students and the instructor or instructors, either synchronously or asynchronously.”  UC courses that include 50% or more of instruction/interaction online should be designated as online courses for the purpose of WSCUC accreditation review.  Degree programs have a similar threshold of 50% [6]: “Institutions must obtain (WSCUC) substantive change approval for programs in which 50% or more of the (degree) program (units for completion of the program) will be offered through distance education.”  For UC students who started as freshmen, the “program” refers to their UC degree.  In the case of a transfer student, the “program” consists only of the courses taken at UC to complete a degree (online courses take prior to transfer are not considered in the 50% calculation).

Federal financial aid rules require at least two engagement activities for online instruction [7].  If requested, an institution should be able to provide a list of courses with online instruction and their engagement activities.  

Correspondence courses are defined as having online instruction but do not have sufficient engagement activities.  For example, a course that posted recorded videos without an engagement activity specific to that content could be called a Correspondence Course.  Federal financial aid cannot be given to students who take more than 50% of their units (credits) as Correspondence Course format [12].

Program Review/Audit:  WSCUC accreditation review occurs every 10 years. However, once a campus starts to offer degree programs online, it is the campus responsibility to submit a “Substantive Change Proposal” to WSCUC – regardless of the time since the last accreditation review.  Federal Financial Aid audits occur every year.

UC faculty value student engagement in learning.  Approved programs should be models of excellence in online education that aim to create a positive reputation, so that if someone learns that a student completed an online program at UC, they do not suspect that the student received an inferior education.

When planning an online major, the following recommendations (based on the principles described previously) should be discussed in consideration of a distance education degree proposal. 

1.     The need for the online format should be motivated in the proposal by the course-level learning goals and the expected program outcomes.  Proposals that simply transfer courses online with minimal modifications should not be approved.  

2.     The prevalence of academic dishonesty in online testing is a well-known issue and resolving it frequently runs into student privacy and technical issues exacerbated by economic inequalities. Proposals should demonstrate that they are able to measure student learning in a robust and equitable manner while respecting student privacy.   

3.     Proposals should contain examples of online courses that are expected to be part of the required online program for which there is evidence that the online format leads to learning outcomes for students that are as good as the in-person format.  

4.     Proposals should have plans to ensure that students have levels of engagement (including one-on-one interactions, advising, and oversight) with instructors (including research-active faculty) that are much the same as those in otherwise similar in-person programs, bearing in mind that online students might lack the informal in-person interactions that in-person students often receive. Instructor-to-student ratios should be low to ensure the delivery of the high-level of education expected from a UC program.   

5.     Engagement with students should be faculty initiated and include activities that are more than just pre-recorded lectures. Examples of engagement activities can be found on page 11 of the WSCUC Substantive Change Manual [6] and defined under Federal Regulation 600.2 (see “Academic Engagement” and “Distance Education” sections 4-5 [7]). 

6.     Proposals should demonstrate that program faculty will devote as much time to mentoring students doing research projects as is typical in otherwise similar in-person programs. 

7.     Facilitating high levels of interactions among students inside and outside of the online classroom will require significant support from faculty and staff, and it may require different modes of interaction online.  Proposals should demonstrate that their program can be successful in this goal.   

8.     Proposals should have a plan for how the faculty members involved in the program will be trained to deliver and assess high quality education and to engage with students online.  Programs are strongly encouraged to collaborate with an instructional design team to design their programs and include the report created by this design team in the proposal.  

9.     Proposals should demonstrate that students in the online program will not be disadvantaged if they decide to change majors, compared to students changing from in-person majors.  

10.   Proposals should demonstrate that the technological requirements will not exacerbate existing inequities in the educational system.  

 

References

 

1]        This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid. Available from: https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/01/28/this-12-billioncompany-is-getting-rich-off-students-cheating-their-way-throughcovid/?sh=4553ad32363f.

2]        2020 Senate Task Force Report. Available from:

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/mg-senate-review-onlinedegree-task-force-report.pdf.

3]        UCEP 2022 OUDP White Paper. Available from:

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/reports/sc-ucep-white-paper-onlinedegrees.pdf.

4]        Department of Education College Scorecard. Available from:

https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/search/?page=0&sort=threshold_earnings:desc.

5]        US News Rankings. Available from: https://www.usnews.com/education/onlineeducation?rv_test7_control.

6]        WSCUC Substantive Change Manual. Available from:

https://wascsenior.app.box.com/s/6oju46p2b6mklgigo2om.

7]        Code of Federal Regulations, Part 600. Available from: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title34/subtitle-B/chapter-VI/part-600.

8]        Case: 1:21-cv-00500-JPC Doc #: 37 Filed: 08/22/22. Available from:

https://bbgohio.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/MSJ-decision.pdf.

9]        Fischer, C., et al. Increasing Success in Higher Education: The Relationships of Online Course Taking With College Completion and Time-to-Degree. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 2021; 355-379]. Available from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.3102/01623737211055768.

10]    Johnson, H., et al. Online Learning and Student Outcomes in California’s Community Colleges. Public Policy Institute of California 2014; Available from:

https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/pubs/report/R_514HJR.pdf.

11]    Cooper, K.M., et al. Diagnosing differences in what Introductory Biology students in a fully online and an in-person biology degree program know and do regarding medical school admission. Adv Physiol Educ 2019 Jun 1; 221-232]. Available from:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31088159.

12]    Correspondence Course Financial Aid Restrictions. Available from:

https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/fsa-handbook/2020-2021/vol2/ch4-auditsstandards-limitations-cohort-default-rates.

The Summer Illusion

Hi from the vicinity of Sogndal, Norway!

My brain is foggy and exhausted from traveling (today we kayaked for three hours and hiked a glacier), so I'm just going to adapt a post from several years ago.

Apologies to commenters here, and social media friends and followers, and email respondents. I'll be back in Riverside next week, and I'll try to catch up on all those things.

*************************************

Every spring I suffer the Summer Illusion. The following three incompatible propositions all seem to me, in the spring, to be true:

(1.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a bunch of that research done which has been crowded out by my teaching and administrative commitments during the school year.

(2.) When summer arrives, I'll finally get a chance to do all of that non-academic stuff that I've been putting off during the school year -- big home maintenance projects, vacation travel to the four new places I want to visit, my plan to catch up on the whole history of golden-age science fiction.

(3.) When summer arrives, I'll finally have a chance to spend a lot more time just relaxing.

The Summer Illusion is surprisingly robust. Every spring, I suffer the Summer Illusion, building up big plans and hopes. Then, every summer, as those hopes fall apart, I scold my springtime self for having fallen, yet again, into the Summer Illusion. The pattern is so common and predictable I've given it a memorable name, The Summer Illusion, to help convince myself that it really is an illusion -- and hopefully not fall into it again. And yet I fall into it again.

You might think that the Summer Illusion depends on entertaining only one of the three propositions at a time. You might think that the way it works is that sometimes I entertain proposition 1 (I'll get my research done!), and at other, different times I entertain proposition 2 (I'll get all my other projects done!), and at still other times I entertain proposition 3 (I'll finally have lots of time to relax!). Largely this is so. And yet the Summer Illusion also survives simultaneous consideration of the three propositions. Even looking at the propositions side by side like this, I am tempted to believe them. Some part of me thinks of course all three can't be true, as I've seen time and time again -- and yet in my heart I continue to believe. Summer days expand so magnificently to fit my fantasies!

It's almost an inversion of busyness. If a period of time has the outward appearance of being a "relaxed", low-commitment period of time, it serves as a fantasy-and-procrastination magnet. I pile my future plans and hopes into that period of time, not noticing the impossibly mounting sum of expectations.

Mostly Overlapping Minds: A Challenge for the View that Minds Are Necessarily Discrete

Last fall I gave a couple of talks in Ohio. While there, I met an Oberlin undergraduate named Sophie Nelson, with whom I have remained in touch. Sophie sent some interesting ideas for my paper in draft "Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons", so I invited her on as a co-author and we have been jointly revising. Check out today's new version!

Let's walk through one example from the paper, originally suggested by Sophie but mutually written for the final draft. I think it stands on its own without need of the rest of the paper as context. For the purposes of this argument we are assuming that broadly human-like cognition and consciousness is possible in computers and that functional and informational processes are what matter to consciousness. (These views are widely but not universally shared among consciousness researchers.)

(Readers who aren't philosophers of mind might find today's post to be somewhat technical and in the weeds.  Apologies for that!)

Suppose there are two robots, A and B, who share much of their circuitry in common. Between them hovers a box in which most of their cognition transpires. Maybe the box is connected by high-speed cables to each of the bodies, or maybe instead the information flows through high bandwidth radio connections. Either way, the cognitive processes in the hovering box are tightly cognitively integrated with A's and B's bodies and the remainders of their minds -- as tightly connected as is ordinarily the case in ordinary unified minds. Despite the bulk of their cognition transpiring in the box, some cognition also transpires in each robot's individual body and is not shared by the other robot. Suppose, then, that A has an experience with qualitative character α (grounded in A's local processors), plus experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ (grounded in the box), while B has experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ (grounded in the box), plus an experience with qualitative character ε (grounded in B's local processors).

If indeterminacy concerning the number of minds is possible, perhaps this isn't a system with a whole number of minds. Indeterminacy, we think, is an attractive view, and one of the central tasks of the paper is to argue in favor of the possibility of indeterminacy concerning the number of minds in hypothetical systems.

Our opponent -- whom we call the Discrete Phenomenal Realist -- assumes that the number of minds present in any system is always a determinate whole number. Either there's something it's like to be Robot A, and something it's like to be Robot B, or there's nothing it's like to be those systems, and instead there's something it's like to be the system as a whole, in which case there is only one person or subjective center of experience. "Something-it's-like-ness" can't occur an indeterminate number of times. Phenomenality or subjectivity must have sharp edges, the thinking goes, even if the corresponding functional processes are smoothly graded. (For an extended discussion and critique of a related view, see my draft paper Borderline Consciousness.)

As we see it, Discrete Phenomenal Realists have three options when trying to explain what's going on in the robot case: Impossibility, Sharing, and Similarity. According to Impossibility, the setup is impossible. However, it's unclear why such a setup should be impossible, so pending further argument we disregard this option. According to Sharing, the two determinately different minds share tokens of the very same experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ. According to Similarity, there are two determinately different minds who share experiences with qualitative characters β, γ, and δ but not the very same experience tokens: A's experiences β1, γ1, and δ1 are qualitatively but not quantitatively identical to B's experiences β2, γ2, and δ2. An initial challenge for Sharing is its violation of the standard view that phenomenal co-occurrence relationships are transitive (so that if α and β phenomenally co-occur in the same mind, and β and ε phenomenally co-occur, so also do α and ε). An initial challenge for Similarity is the peculiar doubling of experience tokens: Because the box is connected to both A and B, the processes that give rise to β, γ, and δ each give rise to two instances of each of those experience types, whereas the same processes would presumably give rise to only one instance if the box was connected only to A.

To make things more challenging for the Discrete Phenomenal Realist who wants to accept Sharing or Similarity, imagine that there's a switch that will turn off the processes in A and B that give rise to experiences α and ε, resulting in A's and B's total phenomenal experience having an identical qualitative character. Flipping the switch will either collapse A and B to one mind, or it will not. This leads to a dilemma for both Sharing and Similarity.

If the defender of Sharing holds that the minds collapse, then they must allow that a relatively small change in the phenomenal field can result in a radical reconfiguration of the number of minds. The point can be made more dramatic by increasing the number of experiences in the box and the number of robots connected to the box. Suppose that 200 robots each have 999,999 experiences arising from the shared box, and just one experience that's qualitatively unique and localized – perhaps a barely noticeable circle in the left visual periphery for A, a barely noticeable square in the right visual periphery for B, etc. If a prankster were to flip the switch back and forth repeatedly, on the collapse version of Sharing the system would shift back and forth from being 200 minds to one, with almost no difference in the phenomenology. If, however, the defender of Sharing holds that the minds don't collapse, then they must allow that multiple distinct minds could have the very same token-identical experiences grounded in the very same cognitive processors. The view raises the question of the ontological basis of the individuation of the minds; on some conceptions of subjecthood, the view might not even be coherent. It appears to posit subjects with metaphysical differences but not phenomenological ones, contrary to the general spirit of phenomenal realism about minds.

The defender of Similarity faces analogous problems. If they hold the number of minds collapses to one, then, like the defender of Sharing, they must allow that a relatively small change in the phenomenal field can result in a radical reduction in the number of minds. Furthermore, they must allow that distinct, merely type-identical experiences somehow become one and the same when a switch is flipped that barely changes the system's phenomenology. But if they hold that there's no collapse, then they face the awkward possibility of multiple distinct minds with qualitatively identical but numerically distinct experiences arising from the same cognitive processors. This appears to be ontologically unparsimonious phenomenal inflation.

Maybe it will be helpful to have the possibilities for the Discrete Phenomenal Realist depicted in a figure. Click to enlarge and clarify.

Dishonesty among Honesty Researchers

Until recently, one of the most influential articles on the empirical psychology of honesty was Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman 2012, which purported to show, across three studies, that people who sign honesty pledges at the beginning of a process in which dishonesty is possible will be much more honest than those who sign at the end of the process. The result is intuitive (if you sign before doing a task, that might change your behavior in a way that signing after wouldn't), and it suggests straightforward, practical interventions: Have students, customers, employees, etc., sign honesty pledges before occasions in which they might be tempted to cheat.

Unfortunately, there appear to have been not just one but two separate instances of fraud in this study, and the results appear not to replicate in an honest (presumably), preregistered replication attempt.

The first fraud was revealed in 2021, and concerned customers' honest or dishonest reporting of mileage to an insurance company. The data appear to have been largely fabricated, either by Ariely or by whoever supplied him the data; none of the other collaborators are implicated.

The second fraud was revealed last week, and appears to be entirely separate, involving multiple papers by Gino, including Study 1 in the already-retracted Shu et al. 2012. In Shu et al., Study 1, participants could receive financial advantage by overreporting travel expenses or how many math puzzles they had solved earlier in the experiment, and purportedly there was less overreporting if participants signed an honesty pledge first. Several participants' results appear to have been strategically shifted from one condition to another to produce the reported effect. In light of an apparent pattern of fraud across several papers, Harvard has put Gino on administrative leave.

Yes, two apparently unrelated instances of fraud, by different researchers, on the very same famous article about honesty.

[some of the evidence of fraud, from https://datacolada.org/109]

For those who follow such news, Gino's case might bring to mind another notorious case of fraud by a Harvard psychologist: In 2010, Marc Hauser, was found to have faked and altered data in his work on rule-learning in monkeys (e.g., here) and subsequently resigned his academic post.

I have three observations:

First, Gino, Ariely, and Hauser are (or were) three of the most prominent moral psychologists in the world. Although Hauser's discovered fraud concerned monkey rule-learning, he was probably as well known for his work on moral cognition, which culminated in his 2006 book Moral Minds. This is a high rate of discovered fraud among leading moral psychology researchers, especially if we assume that most fraud goes undiscovered. I am struck by the parallel to my series of papers on the moral behavior of ethicists (overview here). Ethicists, and apparently also moral psychologists, appear to behave no better on average than socially similar people who don't study morality.

One might think that ethics and moral psychology would either (a.) tend to draw people particularly interested in advancing ethical ends (for example, particularly attuned to the importance of honesty) and thus presumably personally more ethical than average or (b.) at least make ethics personally more salient for them and thus presumably motivationally stronger. Either neither (a) nor (b) are true or studying ethics and moral psychology also has some countervailing negative effect.

Second, around the time of the discovery of his fraud, Hauser was working on a book titled Evilicious, concerning humans' widespread appetite for behaving immorally, and similarly Gino recently published a book titled Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. The titles perhaps speak for themselves: Part of studying moral psychology is studying bad moral psychology. (The "rebels" Gino celebrates might not be breaking moral rules -- celebrating that might impair sales and lucrative speaking gigs -- but the idea does appear to generalize.)

Third, the first and second observation suggest a mechanism by which the study of ethics and moral psychology can negatively affect the ethics of the researcher. If people mostly aim -- as I think they do -- toward moral mediocrity, that is, not to be good or bad by absolute standards but rather to be about as morally good as their peers, then if your opinion about what is common changes, your own behavior will tend to change accordingly to match. The more you study the worst side of humanity, the more you can think to yourself "well, even if X is bad, it's not as bad as all that, and people do X all the time". If you study dishonesty, you might be struck by the thought that dishonesty is everywhere -- and then if you are tempted to be dishonest you might think, "well, everyone else is doing it". I can easily imagine someone in Gino's position thinking, probably most researchers have from time to time shifted around a few rows of data to make their results pop out better. Is it really so bad if I do it too? And then once the deed has been done, it probably becomes easier, for multiple reasons, to assume that such fraud is widespread and just part of the usual academic game (grounds for thinking this might include rationalization, positive self-illusion, and using oneself as a model for thinking about others).

I do still think and hope that fraud is very much the exception. In interacting with dozens of researchers over the years and working through a variety of raw datasets, I've seen some shaky methodology and maybe a few instances of unintentional p-hacking; but I have never witnessed, suspected, seen signs of, or heard any suggestion of outright fraud or data alteration.

Flipping Pascal's Wager on Its Head

In his famous Wager, Pascal contemplates whether one should choose to believe in God. (Maybe we can't directly choose to believe in God any more than we can simply choose to believe that the Sun is purple; but we can choose to expose ourselves to conditions, such as regular association with devoted theists, that are likely to eventually lead us to believe in God.) Although there's some debate about how exactly Pascal conceptualizes the decision, one interpretation is this:

Choose to believe: If God exists, infinite reward; if God does not exist status quo.

Choose to not to believe: If God exists, infinite punishment; if God does not exist status quo.

Suppose that your antecedent credence that God exists is some probability p strictly between 0 and 1. Employing standard decision theory, the expected payoff of believing is p * ∞ [the expected payoff if God does exist] + (1-p) * 0 [the expected payoff if God does not exist] = ∞. The payoff of not believing is p * -∞ + (1-p) * 0 = ∞. Since ∞ > -∞ (to put it mildly), belief is the rational choice.

Now maybe it's cheating to appeal to infinitude. Is Heaven literally infinitely good? (There might, for example, be diminishing returns on joyful experiences over time.) And maybe decision theory in general breaks down when infinitudes are involved (see my recent discussion here). But finite values also work. As long as the "status quo" value is the same in both conditions (or better in the belief condition than the non-belief condition), the calculus still yields a positive result for belief.

If not believing is better in the absence of God, it's a bit more complicated. (Non-belief might be better in the absence of God if believing truths is intrinsically better than believing untruths or if believing that God exists leads one to make sacrifices one wouldn't otherwise make.) But if Heaven would be as good as advertised, even a smidgen of a suspicion that God exists favors belief. For example, if life without belief is one unit better than life with belief, contingent on the non-existence of God, and if Heaven is a billion times better than that one-unit difference and Hell a billion times worse, then the expected payoff for believing in God is p * 1,000,000,000 + (1-p) * -1, and the expected payoff of not believing is p * -1,000,000,000 + (1-p) * 0. This makes belief preferable as long as you think the chance of God's existing is greater than about one in two billion.

So far, so Pascalian. But there's God and then there's the gods. It seems that a more reasonable approach to the wager would consider theistic possibilities other than Pascal's God. Maybe God is an adolescent gamer running Earth in a giant simulation. Maybe the universalists are correct and a benevolent God just lets everyone into Heaven. Or maybe a jealous sectarian God condemns everyone to Hell for failing to believe the one correct theological package (different from Pascal's).

If so, then the decision matrix looks something like this [click to enlarge and clarify]:

In other words, quite an un-Pascalian mess! If the positive and negative values are infinite, then we're stuck adding ∞ and -∞ in our outcomes, normally a mathematically undefined result. If the values are finite but large, then the outcome will depend on the particular probabilities and payoffs, which might be sensitive to hard-to-estimate facts about the total finite goodness of Heaven or badness of Hell. And of course even the decision matrix above is highly simplified compared to the range of diverse theistic possibilities.

But let me suggest one way of clarifying the decision. If God is not benevolent, all bets are off. Who knows what, if anything, an unbenevolent God might reward or punish? Little evidence on Earth points toward one vs another strategy for attaining a good afterlife under a hypothetical unbenevolent deity. I propose that we simplify by removing this possibility from our decision-theoretical calculus, instead considering the decision space on the assumption that if God exists God is benevolent. Doing that, we can get some decision-theoretic traction: a benevolent God, if he/she/it/they reward anything, should reward what's good.

This, then gives us mortals some (additional) reason to do whatever is good.

Here's something that's good: apportioning one's beliefs to the evidence. The world is better off, generally speaking, if people's credence that it will rain on Tuesday tends to match the extent of the evidence that it will rain on Tuesday. The world is better off, generally speaking, if people come to believe that cigarette smoking is bad for one's health once the evidence shows that, if people come to believe in anthropogenic climate change once the evidence shows that, if people decline to believe in alien abductions given that the evidence suggests against it, and so on. Apportioning our beliefs to the evidence is both a type of intellectual success that manifests the flourishing of our reasoning and a pragmatic path to the successful execution of our plans.

This is true for religious belief as well. Irrationally high credence in some locally popular version of God doesn't improve the world, but in fact has historically been a major source of conflict and suffering. Humanity would be better off without a tendency toward epistemically unjustified religious dogmatism. Nor should a benevolent God care much about being worshipped or believed in; that's mere vanity. A truly benevolent God, with our interests at heart, should care mainly that we do what is good -- and this, I suggest includes apportioning our religious beliefs to the evidence.

The evidence does not suggest that we should believe in the existence of God. (We could get into why, but that's a big topic! We can start by considering religious disagreement and the problem of evil.) If a benevolent God rewards or at least does not punish those who apportion their belief to tge evidence, a benevolent God should reward or at least not punish non-believers.

If God does not exist, we're better off apportioning our (non)belief to the (non)evidence. If a benevolent God exists, we're still better off not believing in the God. If God exists but is not benevolent, then decision-making policies break. Thus, we can flip Pascal's wager on its head: Unless we reject decision theory entirely as a means to evaluate the case, we're better off not believing than believing.

New Paper in Draft: Introspection in Group Minds, Disunities of Consciousness, and Indiscrete Persons

I have a new paper in draft, for a special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies.  Although the paper makes reference to a target article by Francois Kammerer and Keith Frankish, it should be entirely comprehensible without knowledge of the target article, and hopefully it's of independent interest.

Abstract:

Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) challenge us to expand our conception of introspection, and mentality in general, beyond neurotypical human cases. This article describes a technologically possible "ancillary mind" modeled on a system envisioned in Ann Leckie's (2013) science fiction novel Ancillary Justice. The ancillary mind constitutes a borderline case between an intimately communicating group of individuals and a single, unified, spatially distributed mind. It occupies a gray zone with respect to personal identity and subject individuation, neither determinately one person or conscious subject nor determinately many persons or conscious subjects. Advocates of a Phase Transition View of personhood or Discrete Phenomenal Realism might reject the possibility of indeterminacy concerning personal identity and subject individuation. However, the Phase Transition View is empirically unwarranted, and Discrete Phenomenal Realism is metaphysically implausible. If ancillary minds defy discrete countability, the same might be true for actual group minds on Earth and human cases of multiple personality or Dissociative Identity.

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Full draft here.  As usual, comments, questions, objections welcome, either as comments on this post or directly by email to my academic address.

The Fundamental Argument for Dispositionalism about Belief

I'm back from travel to Paris and Antwerp, where I spoke with people influenced by, and critical of, my "dispositionalist" approach to belief.  A critique of my work has also just appeared in the journal Theoria.  It's an honor to be criticized!

Over the years, I've advanced various arguments for dispositionalism about belief (here, here, here, here, here, here, here).  Today, I want to synthesize and restate the most fundamental one.

Dispositionalism Characterized

According to dispositionalism as I understand it, to believe some proposition P is nothing more or less than to have a certain suite of behavioral, cognitive, and phenomenal (that is, conscious experience involving) dispositions.  Which dispositions?  Dispositions of the sort that we are apt to associate with belief that P.  This might sound circular, but it's not: It is to ground metaphysics in commonsense psychology.  Stealing an example from Gilbert Ryle, to believe that the ice is dangerously thin is to be prone to skate warily, to dwell in the imagination on possible disasters, to warn other skaters, to agree with other people's assertions to that effect, to feel alarm and surprise upon seeing someone skate successfully across it, and so on, including being ready generally to make plans and draw consequences that depend on the truth of P.

[Midjourney rendition of skaters approaching thin ice]

As is typical of dispositions in general, the relevant dispositions hold only ceteris paribus (all else being equal or normal or right).  For example, you might not be disposed to warn other skaters if you'd like to see them fall in.  The dispositions are potentially limitless in number: Less obvious ones include the disposition to assume that a circular disk cut from the ice would be fragile and the disposition to attend curiously to a fox walking across the ice.  One needn't possess every disposition on the infinitely expandable list in order to count as a P believer -- just enough of the dispositional structure that attributing the belief to you adequately captures your general cognitive posture toward P.

Although dispositionalism about belief can seem confusing, dispositionalism about personality traits is intuitive.  Thus, comparison to personality traits is instructive.  Consider extraversion.  To be an extravert is nothing more or less than to have the dispositional profile stereotypical of extraversion: a tendency to say yes to party invitations, a tendency to enjoy meeting new people, a readiness to take the lead in conversation and in organizing social events, and so forth.  Of course all of these dispositions are ceteris paribus and no one is going to to be 100% extraverted down the line.  Match the dispositional characterization of extraversion closely enough, and you're an extravert; that's all there is to it.  Similarly, match the dispositional characterization of being a thin-ice believer closely enough, and you are one; that's all there is to it.

The Fundamental Argument

Now consider some alternative, non-dispositionalist account of belief, where believing is constituted by some feature other than one's overall dispositional profile with respect to P.  Call that alternative feature Feature X.  Maybe Feature X is having a stored representation with the content that P.  Maybe Feature X is having a particular neural structure.  Maybe Feature X involves being responsive to evidence for or against P.  If Feature X is metaphysically distinct from having a belief-that-P-ish dispositional structure, then it ought to be possible in principle to imagine cases in which Feature X is absent and the dispositional structure is present and vice versa.  I submit that in such cases, first, we intuitively do, and second, we pragmatically ought, to attribute belief in a way that tracks the belief-that-P-ish dispositional structure rather than the presence or absence of Feature X.  That's the fundamental argument.

As a warm-up, consider space aliens.  Tomorrow, they arrive from Alpha Centauri.  They learn our languages, trade with us, fall in love with some of us, join our corporations and governments, write philosophy and psychology articles, reveal their technological secrets, and recount amazing tales about their home planet.  Stipulate, too, that we somehow know their cognitive dispositions and their phenomenology (that is, their streams of conscious experience).  We know that if they say "P is so, I'm sure of it!" and then not-P is revealed to be true, they normally feel surprise.  We know that they have inner speech and imagery like ours, and that when they assert that P they tend to draw further logical conclusions from P and make plans that will only work if P is true.

I submit that if we know all these dispositional facts about the aliens, we know that they have beliefs.  What kinds of brains do they have?  What kind of underlying cognitive architecture?  How did they come to have their present dispositional structures?  Who knows!  As far as belief is concerned, it doesn't matter.  They have what it takes to believe.

Suppose that Feature X is having internal structured representations of a certain sort.  Imagine, now, a space alien -- call her Breana -- with a radically different cognitive architecture from ours, lacking internal structured representations of the required sort, but possessing the behavioral, cognitive, and phenomenal dispositions characteristic of belief.  Breana will act and react, behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively, just like an entity with beliefs.  Maybe Breana says "microbes live beneath the ice of Europa" with a feeling of sincerity and accompanying visual imagery of slime beneath the ice.  She draws relevant conclusions (Earth is not the only planet with life in the Solar System).  She would feel confused and surprised if a seemingly knowledgeable friend contradicted her.  If a human asked where we should probe to find alien life, she would recommend Europa.  And so on.  Breana believes, despite lacking internal structured representations of the required sort.

My opponent might say that if Breana acts and reacts as I have described her, then she must have internal representations of the required sort and thus would not be a counterinstance to a representationalist account.  I respond with a dilemma: Either representationalism does not commit to the existence of internal representations of the required sort whenever the belief-that-P-ish dispositional structure is present or it does commit.  If the former, then we ought to be able to construct a Breana-like case without the required underlying representations, producing the objectionable case of the previous paragraph.  If the latter -- that is, if it is metaphysically or conceptually necessary that whenever a belief-that-P-ish dispositional structure is present, the entity has the required representational structure -- then the so-called "representationalism" collapses into dispositionalism: The dispositions drive the metaphysical car, so to speak, and having the pattern of dispositions is just what it is to represent.

How about the converse case, where the representational structure is present but the dispositions are absent?  Breana has a stored representation with the content P, but she has no inclination to act or react, or to reason or plan, accordingly.  "Microbes live beneath the ice in Europa" is somehow internally represented, but she would not assent to that proposition verbally or in inner speech; she would feel no surprise upon learning that it is false; she would never make any plans contingent upon its truth; when she imagines Europa, she pictures it as sterile; if quizzed on the topic, she would fail; in no condition could she be provoked to remember that she learned this; and so on.  Breana will of course sincerely deny that she believes P.  It would be strange to insist that despite her sincere protests, she really does believe.

Thus, to the extent that representationalism's Feature X comes apart from dispositional structure, our intuitive standards of belief attribution follow the dispositional structure rather than the presence or absence of Feature X.  And that's how it should be.  What we can and do care about in belief attribution is the believer's overall cognitive posture toward the world -- how they are disposed to act and react, what they will affirm and depend on, what they take for granted in their inferences, and so forth -- not whether there's a tokening of "P" in a hidden mental warehouse.

Note that unlike old-school behaviorist dispositionalism, this argument is immune to concerns about puppets and play-acting.  (Actually, I think the behaviorist has some underappreciated resources here, but dispositionalism of the form I prefer need not rely on those resources.)  Puppets aren't conscious and don't reason, so they have no phenomenal or cognitive dispositions.  Actors who pretend to believe that P while really holding not-P have the phenomenal and cognitive dispositions characteristic of not-P, including relying on not-P in their own deceptive plans, and the ceteris paribus clause is triggered for their behavioral dispositions, explaining why they don't act like P believers.  (Compare: An extravert paid a large sum to act like an introvert is really still an extravert.)

Other approaches to belief are vulnerable to the same fundamental argument.  Suppose that Feature X involves the capacity to rationally revise your belief in the face of counterevidence.  Now imagine someone who acts and reacts exactly like a P-believer, matching the dispositional profile in every respect, except that they stubbornly eschew any counterevidence.  We ordinarily would, and should, describe that person as a P-believer.  They will self-ascribe the belief, insist on its truth, reason from it, plan on its basis, and so forth.  Of course they believe it!  In fact, if they would never revise it, we might be inclined to say they believe it very strongly indeed.

Suppose that Feature X involves something about the causal history of the belief state: To be a belief, the cognitive state must have been caused in a certain way.  Now imagine Swampman: Lightning strikes a swamp, and by freak quantum chance a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of your favorite philosopher emerges.  Let's stipulate (though it's complicated) that this philosopher has all the dispositions characteristic of belief.  We would, and should, say that Swampman believes.  Or imagine a conscious robot, printed fresh from the factory with a full set of behavioral, cognitive, and phenomenal dispositions.  This robot believes, even though the disposition, for example, to say "Earth is approximately spherical" did not arise in the usual way from evidence or testimony to that effect.  Again, this seems both natural to say and to track what we do and should care about in ascribing beliefs. 

Suppose that Feature X involves a normative standard.  A belief is a state that is "correct" only if it is true.  Either assessibility by this standard corresponds with having the required dispositional structure, or assessibility by this standard can come apart from having the required dispositional structure.  If the former, then being assessible by the normative standard is a consequence of having the dispositional structure constitutive of believing.  If the latter, then either there are beliefs that are not normatively assessible in that way (e.g., religious beliefs?) or there are states that are normatively assessible in the way we normally assess beliefs but which are not in fact beliefs (e.g., delusions?).

The Metaphilosophical Frame

Although I think alternative views often face empirical problems (especially concerning "in-between" cases of belief in which people only approximately match the relevant dispositional profiles), the fundamental argument as I've described it here doesn't rely on empirical objections to alternative views.  Instead, it relies on a particular metaphilosophical approach.

Stipulate that we can define "belief" in a dispositionalist way or alternatively in some other way, and that both definitions are coherent and face no insuperable empirical obstacles.  Now we, as philosophers, face a choice.  How do we want to define belief?  What definition captures what we do care about and should care about in belief ascription?  What way of thinking about belief sorts cases in the way it's most useful to sort them?

We will ordinarily, I think, find it natural and intuitive to sort cases by the dispositionalist criteria.  That creates a default supposition in favor of dispositionalism.  But dispositionalism might not always track ordinary patterns of belief ascription.  In some cases, our intuitions are ambivalent or go the other way.  (See my discussion of intellectualism, for example.)  More important, the dispositionalist approach tracks what matters in belief ascription.  Dispositionalism captures what we should most want to capture with the term "belief" -- that is, our general dispositional posture toward the truth of P, whether we will affirm it, defend it, rely on it in planning and inference, feel confident when we contemplate it, and so forth.