On Whether the Job of an Ethicist Is Only to Theorize about Morality, Not to Be Moral

Over several studies, I've found that professional ethicists tend to behave no better than non-ethicists. Ethicists sometimes react to my work by saying "My job is to theorize about ethics, not to live the moral life." What should we make of this response?

First: I agree about the formal job description.

Second: If the idea is that an ethicist's professionally espoused moral views both are and should be entirely isolated from her personal life, that seems an odd position to endorse. Taken to its natural conclusion, it seems to imply that ethicists advocating vegetarianism should be expected to consume cheeseburgers at the same rate as does everyone else. We should resist that conclusion. Both normatively and descriptively, we should expect Peter Singer to live at least approximately the vegetarianism he so passionately advocates. Analogously, if not quite as starkly, it seems reasonable to expect those Kantians who think that lying is particularly heinous to lie a bit less, on average, than do other people, and to expect Confucians who see filial duty as important to be a bit more attentive to their parents, and to expect consequentialists who emphasize the huge importance of donating to famine relief to donate a bit more to famine relief than do other people. Sainthood would be too much expect. But some movement to harmonize one's life and one's moral theories seems both normatively appropriate and descriptively likely, at least on the face of it.

Third: Ethicists seem, on average, to espouse somewhat more stringent moral views than do non-ethicists. For example, ethicists seem to be more likely than non-ethicists to say it's morally bad to eat meat, and on average they seem to think that people should donate more to charity than non-ethicists seem to think people should donate. (See here.) Unless there is some countervailing force, then, movements to harmonize normative attitude and real-world behavior ought to lead ethicists, on average, to regulate their moral behavior a bit more stringently than do non-ethicists. The problem is that this doesn't seem empirically to be the case. For example, although Josh Rust and I found 60% of ethicists to describe "regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork" as morally bad, compared to 45% of other philosophers and only 19% of professors in other departments, when asked if they had eaten meat at their previous evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference among the three groups.

Fourth: So we might consider some countervailing forces. One possibility is that there's some kind of "moral licensing" effect. Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist donates a wad to charity. Maybe then she feels free to behave worse in other ways than she otherwise would have. Suppose a Kantian remains rigorously honest at some substantial cost to his welfare. Maybe then he feels freer to be a jerk to his students. One depressing thought is that all this cancels out: Our efforts to live by our ethical principles exert sufficient psychic costs that we compensate by acting worse in other ways, only moving around the lump under the rug.

A very different possibility: Maybe those of us attracted to moral theorizing tend to be people with deficient moral emotional reactions, which we compensate for intellectually. Our moral reflection as ethicists does morally improve us, after all, relative to where we would be without that reflection -- but that improvement only brings us up to average.

Still another possibility: Ethicists are especially talented at coming up with superficially appealing rationalizations of immoral behavior, setting them free to engage in immoralities that others would resist. On average, the boost from harmonizing to stricter norms and the loss from toxic rationalization approximately cancel out.

There are other possibilities, too, interesting and empirically risky. We should explore such possibilities! But I don't think that such exploration is what ethicists have in mind when they say their job is only to theorize about morality, not to live it.

Fifth: I acknowledge that there is something a bit unfair, still, about holding ethicists to especially high standards because of their career choice. I don't really want to do that. In fact, I find something admirable in embracing and advocating stringent moral standards, even if one doesn't succeed in living up to those standards. Ultimately, most of the weight in evaluating people's moral character should rest on how they behave, not on how far they fall short of their own standards, which might be self-scathingly high or self-flatteringly low.

My aim is not to scold ethicists for failing to live up to their often high standards but rather to confront the issue of why there seems to be such a tenuous connection between philosophical moral reflection and real-world moral behavior. The dismissive "that's not my job" seems to me to be exactly the wrong spirit to bring to the issue.

On Whether the Rich Are Jerks

A recent article by Paul Piff and collaborators, purporting to show that rich people are jerks (more formally: "higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior"), has been getting attention in the popular media. Numerous people have sent me the article, correctly surmising that I'd be interested given my own research on the moral behavior of (generally high socioeconomic status) ethicists.

The article nicely displays some of the difficulties of researching moral behavior.

First, let me express a thought about the article's reception. If Piff and collaborators had found no differences in behavior, it seems a reasonable conjecture that the article would have received less attention. It might even have been difficult to publish at all. The same might be true even if Piff et al had found significant results but in the opposite direction, that is, if they had found the rich better behaved. Readers' and referees' critical acumen would probably have been activated, much more so than for a sexy result that tickles our fancy. Consider the many filters that a study must pass -- from approval by one's advisor, to design, to data collection, to analysis and write-up, to refereeing, to editorial acceptance, to public dissemination. At each step, the sexy study has an advantage over less-sexy competitors. The cumulative advantage in the marketplace of ideas should make us nervous about forming our opinions based on what we see in the news. (I recognize this applies to my own research on ethics professors too. So far, my most frequently mentioned study on ethicists is the one study that found ethicists behaving worse.)

Now let's consider the methods. The authors report the results of seven different studies.

Two studies examine the rudeness of drivers. Piff et al report that people driving fancy cars are less likely to wait their turn at a four-way stop and less likely to stop for a pedestrian entering a crosswalk. While I like the real-world naturalness of this study ("ecological validity"!), this particular measure seems very likely to be subject to experimenter effects -- that is, distortion in coding and results so as to favor the hypothesis of the experimenter. Experimenter effects can be large even when there is no obvious source of bias (hence medical research typically aims to be "double blind"). In this case the sources of possible coder bias seem obvious and very difficult to control. This is especially true of the crosswalk study. A confederate of the experimenter steps out into the crosswalk, and the experimenter codes both the perceived status of the car and whether it stops. Wisely, the status of the car is coded before the experimenter knows whether it has stopped. But anyone who has been a pedestrian in the San Francisco Bay Area (where the study was conducted) knows that the crosswalk is a place of subtle communication between ped and driver: You take a step out, you catch the driver's eye. How confidently you step, the look on your face, your reaction (or not) to the driver's glance and to the change (or not) of velocity -- all this has a big effect on what happens. The results might as easily reflect the expectations of the experimenter as any real difference in driving patterns. So this is exactly the sort of case in which one would expect large experimenter effects. Since the results have only mid-grade p values (.05 > p > .01), a small experimenter effect could vitiate them entirely.

(Piff et al state that the coders and confederates were "blind to the hypothesis of the study", but it is hard to imagine that the coders don't at least have strong suspicions, given that they are being asked to code the luxuriousness of the vehicles. At the very least, this should make vehicle status very salient to them, amping up any of the coders' prior expectations of a relationship between vehicle status and driving behavior.)

How about the other studies? Studies 3 and 5 asked participants to read scenarios and then describe how ethically or unethically they would act in those scenarios. Piff et al report that participants reporting higher social class also report that they would act less ethically in such scenarios. Would it seem too fussy of me to say that I don't fully trust self-report of moral behavior in hypothetical scenarios? I would like some evidence that this isn't, say, actually a measure of honesty and frankness instead of a measure of differences in how one would really act in such scenarios, with self-reports of less moral behavior revealing more honesty and frankness than do self-reports of moral perfection. That interpretation would completely flip the moral significance of Piff et al's results. Or maybe the measure is really something more like a measure of one's opinion about one's own moral character, which might have a zero correlation with real differences in moral character (as I suggest here)?

In Study 4, after completing filler tasks, participants were offered candy from a jar ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory. Afterwards, they were asked how many candies they had taken from the jar. Participants who had been primed to think of themselves as relatively low class (by being asked to compare themselves to the rich, the well educated, and the prestigiously employed) reported having taken less candy than participants who had been primed to think of themselves as relatively high class [edited 5/28]. "Wait, what?" I hear you asking. They reported having taken more candy? But did they actually take more candy? If I'm reading the article correctly, the experimenters chose not to measure actual theft, relying on self-report instead, though the subjects' fingers were right there in the jar! Thus, honesty is confounded with immorality, as in Studies 3 and 5. Perhaps I can also mention the weirdness of coming into a psychology lab and then being offered candy ostensibly for children elsewhere. Are participants really buying this cover story? I participated in a few psychology studies as an undergrad, and I suspect I wouldn't have bought it for a minute. Educated undergrads expect to be lied to by psychologists.

Study 6 also has cover story problems (see also my discussion of a similar study by Gino and Ariely). Participants are set in front of a computer ostensibly presenting them with the outcome of random die rolls. Participants are asked to self-report the outcome -- without the experimenter checking -- and they are told they will have a higher chance of winning a prize if they self-report higher results. I ask you to imagine yourself as a participant in this experiment. What do you think is going on? Is there a moral obligation to tell the truth? Or is the whole thing just silly? The experimenters have brought you into this weird situation in which they seem, pretty much explicitly, to be asking you to lie to them. They, of course, are themselves lying to you, as you probably suspect. The connection between behavior in this setting and real-world honesty seems dubious at best.

In Study 7, participants were either asked to list three things about their day or three benefits of greed. They were then asked to self-report whether they would engage in immoral behavior in hypothetical scenarios. Participants who had been asked to list positive features of greed said that they would engage in more immoral behavior in the hypothetical scenarios, and this was especially the case for the lower socioeconomic status participants. Therefore...? In addition to the general types of concerns raised above, I might mention that an experimental context in which a researcher is asking you to list advantages of greed might encourage the respondent to entertain certain hypotheses about the experiment that influence her answers. It might also encourage the respondent to expect a more forgiving moral atmosphere in which self-report of selfish behavior would be viewed less negatively.

Real moral behavior is hard to measure. I appreciate the difficulty of the researchers' task. Three cheers for convergent measures! I think it's cool that this is being done, and I enjoyed reading the article and thinking about the issues. But I hope I will be forgiven for not buying it in this case.

Update, May 28: Readers of the post might also be interested in this critical reaction and response (HT Rolf Degen).

Why Tononi Should Think That the United States Is Conscious

The is the fourth and probably last in a series of posts on why several major theorists of consciousness should attribute literal "phenomenal" conscious experience to the United States, considered as a concrete but spatially distributed entity at least partly composed by citizens and residents. Previous posts treated Dennett, Dretske, and Humphrey. Humphrey and I have an extended exchange in the comments field of my post on his work, and I have offered general considerations supporting the view that if materialism is true the United States is probably conscious here, here, and here (page 18 ff). A full-length paper is in the works but not yet in circulatable shape.

I chose Dennett, Dretske, Humphrey, and Tononi as my sample theorists for two reasons: First, they represent a diverse range of very prominent materialist theories of conscious. And second, they are theoretically ambitious, trying to explain consciousness in general in any possible organism (and not just human consciousness or consciousness as it appears on Earth, like most scientific and neural accounts), covering the metaphysics from top to bottom (and not, say, resting upon a relatively unanalyzed notion of "representation" on which it would be unclear whether the United States literally has the right sort of representations).

Of our four theorists, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi’s view (2004, 2008; Balduzzi and Tononi 2009) enables the quickest argument to the consciousness of the United States. Tononi equates consciousness with “integrated information”. “Information”, in Tononi’s sense, is abundant in the universe – present everywhere or almost everywhere there is causation. And information is integrated, at least in a tiny degree, whenever there are contingent causal connections within a system with a bit a structure – a system that is not collapsed into maximum entropy. Since integrated information is pervasive, so also, Tononi says, is consciousness. He says that “even a binary photodiode is not completely unconscious, but rather enjoys exactly 1 bit of consciousness” (2008, p. 236; cf. Chalmers 1996 on thermostats). Likewise, Tononi attributes “qualia” (that is, consciousness) to simple logical AND and OR gates (Balduzzi and Tononi 2009). On Tononi’s view, what distinguishes human consciousness from photodiode consciousness, OR-gate consciousness, and speck-of-dust consciousness is its richness of detail: The brain is massively informationally complex and integrated, and thus enjoys consciousness orders of magnitude more complex than that of simple systems.

Before we saddle Tononi straightaway with commitment to the consciousness of the United States, though, there is one issue to address: Despite the liberality of his view, Tononi does not regard every putative system as an “entity” that could be the locus of consciousness. If a putative system contains no causal, that is, informational, connections between its parts, then it is not an entity in the relevant sense; it is not, he says, a “complex”. Also, a putative system is not a conscious entity or complex if a larger, more informationally integrated system entirely subsumes it. For example, two disparate nodes do not constitute a conscious complex if a third node lies between them creating a more informationally integrated network. This restriction on the possible loci of consciousness is still extremely liberal by commonsense standards: Complexes can nest and overlap, for example, within the brain, where tightly integrated subsystems interact within larger less-integrated systems.

It seems straightforward that residents of the United States also form multiple overlapping, causally connected complexes. Despite Tononi’s general caveat about what can legitimately count as an entity or a complex, there seem to be no Tononian grounds for denying that the United States is such an entity or complex and thus a locus of consciousness. Its subsystems are informationally connected, and it doesn’t appear to be subsumed within any more tightly informationally integrated system. (I’m assuming the world community and the Earth as a whole are not more tightly informationally integrated than is the U.S., but doesn’t matter for my ultimate argument if we relax this assumption and grant that on Tononi’s view it would be the world community or planet as a whole that is conscious, rather than the United States.) This conclusion seems especially evident given Tononi’s assertion that conscious complexes exist “at multiple spatial and temporal scales” “in most natural (and artificial) systems” (2004, p. 19). Choose the right temporal and spatial scale and Tononi’s view will deliver group consciousness.

The only question that would appear to remain is whether the United States is informationally integrated enough to have a rich stream of conscious experience, or whether its consciousness is substantially impoverished compared to that of a normal human being. This matter is somewhat difficult to assess, but given the massive informational transfer between people and the highly sensitive complex contingencies in human interaction, including in large-group interactions over longish time frames, I would think a plausible first guess from Tononi’s perspective should be that the United States (or world community), when assessed at the appropriate time scale, has at least as rich a stream of conscious experience as does a small mammal.

Update April 3:
In the comments section, Scott Bakker has kindly pointed me toward a new paper by Tononi. This paper seems to reflect a substantial change in Tononi's position with respect to the issues above. While I think the view above accurately captures Tononi's view through at least 2009, it will require substantial modification in light of his most recent remarks.

Update June 6:
See here for my reaction to Tononi's updated position.

Final Call for Papers: Consciousness and Moral Cognition

Submissions for a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology on consciousness attribution in moral cognition are due at the end of this month. The list of invited authors includes: Kurt Gray (Maryland) and Chelsea Schein (Maryland), Anthony I. Jack (Case Western Reserve) and Philip Robbins (Missouri), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Justin Sytsma (East Tennessee State), and Liane Young (Boston College).

Submissions are due March 31, 2012.

The full CFP, including relevant dates and submission details, is available on RoPP's website.

Ethicists No More Likely Than Non-Ethicists to Pay Their Registration Fees at APA Meetings

As some of you will know, I have an abiding interest in the moral behavior of ethics professors. I've collected a variety of evidence suggesting that ethics professors behave on average no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics (e.g., here, here, here, here, and here). Here's another study.

Until recently, the American Philosophical Association had more or less an honor system for paying meeting registration fees. There was no serious enforcement mechanism for ensuring that people who attended the meeting -- even people appearing on the program as chairs, speakers, or commentators -- actually paid their registration fees. (Now, however, you can't get the full program with meeting room locations without having paid the fees.)

Registration fees are not exorbitant: Since at least the mid-2000s, pre-registration for APA members been $50-$60. (Fees are somewhat higher for non-members and for on-site registration. For students, pre-registration is $10 and on-site registration is $15.) According to the APA, these fees don't fully cover the costs of hosting the meetings, with the difference subsidized from other sources of revenue. Barring exceptional circumstances, people attending the meeting plausibly have an obligation to pay their registration fees. This might be especially true for speakers and commentators, since the APA has given them a podium to promulgate their ideas.

From personal experience, I believe that almost everyone appearing on the APA program attends the meeting (maybe 95%). What I've done, then, is this: I have compared published lists of Pacific APA program participants from 2006-2008 with lists of people who paid their registration fees at those meetings -- data kindly provided by the APA with the permission of the Pacific Division. (The Pacific Division meeting is the best choice for several reasons, and both of the recent Secretary-Treasurers, Anita Silvers and Dom Lopes have been generous in supporting my research.)

Let me emphasize one point before continuing: The data were provided to me with all names encrypted so that I could not determine the registration status of any particular individual. This was a condition of the Pacific Division's cooperation and of UC Riverside's review board approval. It is also very much my own preference. I am interested only in group trends.

To keep this post to manageable size, I've put further details about coding here.

Here, then, are my preliminary findings:

Overall, 76% of program participants paid their registration fees: 75% in 2006, 76% in 2007, and 77% in 2008. (The increasing trend is not statistically significant.)

74% of participants presenting ethics-related material (henceforth "ethicists": see the coding details) paid their registration fees, compared to 76% of non-ethicists, not a statistically significant difference (556/750 vs. 671/885, z = -0.8, p = .43, 95% CI for diff -6% to +3%).

Other predictors:

* People on the main program were more likely to have paid their fees than were people whose only participation was on the group program: 77% vs. 65% (p < .001).

* Gender did not appear to make a difference: 75% of men vs. 76% of women paid (p = .60).

* People whose primary participation was in a (generally submitted and blind refereed) colloquium session were more likely to have paid than people whose primary participation was in a (generally invited) non-colloquium session on the main program: 81% vs. 74% (p = .004).

* There was a trend, perhaps not statistically significant, for faculty at Leiter-ranked PhD-granting institutions to have been less likely to have paid registration fees than students at those same institutions: Leiter-ranked faculty 73% vs. people not at Leiter-ranked institutions (presumably mostly faculty) 75% vs. students at Leiter-ranked institutions 81% (chi-square p = .11; Leiter-ranked faculty vs. students, p = .03).

* There was a marginally significant trend for speakers and commentators to have been more likely to have paid their fees than people whose only role was chairing: 76% vs. 71% (p = .097).

Ethicists differed from non-ethicists in several dimensions.

* 33% of ethicists were women vs. 18% of non-ethicists (p < .001).

* 63% of participants whose only appearance was on the group program were ethicists vs. 42% of participants who appeared on the main program (p < .001).

* Looking only at the main program, 35% of participants whose highest level of participation was in a colloquium session were ethicists vs. 49% whose highest level of participation was in a non-colloquium session (p < .001). (I considered speaking as a higher level of participation than commenting and commenting as a higher level of participation than chairing.)

* Among faculty in Leiter-ranked departments, a smaller percentage were ethicists (38%) than among participants who were not Leiter-ranked faculty (49%, p < .001). (I've found similar results in another study too.)

I addressed these potential confounds in two ways.

First, I ran split analyses. For example, I looked only at main program participants to see if ethicists were more likely to have registered than were non-ethicists (they weren't: 77% vs. 77%, p = .90), and I did the same for participants who were only in group sessions (also no difference: 65% vs. 64%, p = .95). No split analysis revealed a significant difference between ethicists and non-ethicists.

Second, I ran logistic regressions, using the following dummy variables as predictors: ethicist, group program participant, colloquium participant, student at Leiter-ranked institution, chair. In one regression, those were the only predictors. In a second regression, each variable was crossed as an "interaction variable" with ethicist. No interaction variable was significant. In the non-interaction regression, colloquium role and main program participation were both positively predictive of having registered (p < .01) and participation only as chair was negatively predictive (p < .01). Being a student at a Leiter-ranked institution was not predictive (p = .18) and -- most importantly for my analysis -- being an ethicist was also not predictive (logistic beta = .04, p = .72), confirming the main result of the non-regression analysis.

[Thanks to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association for providing access to their data, anonymously encoded, on my request. However, this research was neither solicited by nor conducted on behalf of the APA or the Pacific Division.]

Update March 17, for those concerned about privacy: See the comments section for a bit more detail on the methods used to ensure that no one outside the APA was able to determine any individual's registration status.

Women's Roles in APA Meetings

I've been looking into data on whether ethicists are more or less likely than non-ethicists to pay their registration fees at meetings of the American Philosophical Association. As part of this project, I've coded program participation data from the Pacific APA from 2006-2008. Given the gender issues in philosophy, I thought readers might be interested to see the data broken down by gender.

Gender coding was based on first name only, excluding people with gender-ambiguous first names, first initials only, and foreign names if the gender was not obvious to the U.S. coders (altogether 10% of the program slots were excluded from gender coding for these reasons).

First: Women occupied 25% of the Pacific APA program slots each year. This rate was remarkably consistent, in fact: 25.3% in 2006, 24.8% in 2007, and 24.8% in 2008, with about 1000 gender-coded program slots each year. This 25% representation on the program is approximately in line with estimates of the percentage of U.S. philosophers who are women (compare, e.g., my 23% estimate across 5 U.S. states, Leiter's report of 21% from the National Center for Education Statistics, and the 2009 Survey of Earned Doctorates finding that women receive about 30% of U.S. philosophy PhDs).

One very consistent finding in my research is that female philosophers are more likely to be ethicists than non-ethicists. My Pacific APA data fit this pattern. I coded talks, by title, as "ethics", "non-ethics", or "excluded". "Ethics" was construed broadly to include political philosophy and philosophy of law. "Excluded" talks included talks on religion, philosophy of action, gender, race, and issues in the profession (such as technology or teaching) unless the title of those talks suggested an ethical focus. Philosophers chairing or commenting on sessions containing a mix of ethics and non-ethics talks were also excluded from this analysis. 33% of participant slots in ethics were occupied by women, compared to 18% in non-ethics (363/1085 vs. 232/1315, p less than .001).

I also broke the data down by role in the program. Women were slightly more likely to be on the "group program" than the "main program": 28% vs. 24% (579/2408 vs. 198/704, p = .03). However, this effect appears to be driven by the fact that the group program had proportionately more ethics slots than did the main program (60% of group program participant slots were ethics vs. 41% of main program participant slots, 338/561 vs. 876/2126, p less than .001). As noted above, women were more likely to occupy ethics slots. Regression analysis suggests that women were not more likely to be group program than main program participants when this other factor is taken into account.

Within the main program, I found no statistically detectable difference in the likelihood of being in the (usually submitted and blind refereed) colloquium sessions than in the (usually invited) non-colloquium sessions (23% vs. 25%, 245/1091 vs. 326/1318, p = .38) (See also Dom Lopes' analysis here and here). Nor did I find a difference in the likelihood as serving in the chair role as opposed to speaking or commenting (27% vs. 24%, 209/780 vs. 568/2332, p = .18).

Cohen, Dennett, and Humphrey

Readers might be interested to see Cohen and Dennett's reply to my February 28 post on their work on reportability and consciousness (which I have added as an update to that post) and/or my extended discussion with Nick Humphrey in the comments section of my March 8 post on why he should think that the United States is conscious.

Why Humphrey Should Think That the United States Is Conscious

In February, I argued that Daniel Dennett and Fred Dretske should, given their other views, hold that the United States is a spatially distributed group entity with a stream of experience of its own (a stream of experience over and above the experiences of the individual citizens and residents of the United States). Today I'm going to the suggest the same about psychologist Nicholas Humphrey.

My general project is to argue that that if materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious. I've advanced some general considerations in favor of that claim. But I also want to examine some particular materialist theories in more detail. I've chosen Dennett, Dretske, Humphrey, and (coming up) Guilio Tononi because their theories are prominent, aim to explain consciousness in any possible organism (not just human beings), and cover the metaphysics top to bottom.

Humphrey is a particularly interesting case because, awkwardly for my view, he explicitly denies that collective entities made of separate bounded individuals, such as swarms of bees, can have conscious experience (1992, p. 194). I will now argue that Humphrey, by the light of his own theory, should recant such remarks.

Humphrey argues that a creature has conscious experience when it has high-fidelity recurrent feedback loops in its sensory system (1992, 2011). A "sensory system", per Humphrey, is a system that represents what is going on inside the creature and directs behavior accordingly. No fancy minds are required for "sensation" in Humphrey's sense; such systems can be as simple as the reactivity of an amoeba to chemicals or light. (Humphrey also contrasts sensation with "perception", which provides information not about states of the body but rather about the outside world.) For consciousness, the only thing necessary besides a sensory system, on Humphrey's (1992) view, is that there be high-fidelity, momentarily self-sustaining feedback loops within that system -- loops between input and output, tuned and integrated across subjective time.

At first glance, you might think this theory would imply a superabundance of consciousness in the natural world, since sensory systems (by Humphrey's liberal definition) are cheap and feedback loops are cheap. But near the end of his 1992 book, Humphrey proves conservative. He rules out, for example, worms and fleas, saying that their sensory feedback loops "are too long and noisy to sustain reverberant activity" (1992, p. 195). Maybe even consciousness is limited only to "higher vertebrates such as mammals and birds, although not necessarily all of these" (ibid.).

Humphrey argues against conscious experience in spatially discontinuous entities as follows: Collective entities, he says, don't have bodies, and thus they lack a boundary between the me and the not-me (1992, p. 193-194). Since sensation (unlike perception) is necessarily directed at one's own bodily states, collective organisms necessarily lack sensory systems. Thus, they're not even candidates for consciousness. The argument is quick. Its subpoints are undefended, and it occupies less than a paragraph.

One plausible candidate for the boundary of a collective organism is the boundary of the discontinuous region occupied by all its members' bodies. The individual bees are each part of the colony; the flowers and birds and enemy bees are not part of the colony. That could be the me and the not-me -- at least as much me/not-me as an amoeba has! The colony reacts to disturbances of this body so as to preserve as much of it as possible from threats, and it deploys parts of its body (individual bees) toward collective ends, for example via communicative bee dances in a tangled informational loop at the center of the colony.

Humphrey makes no mention of spatial contiguity in developing his account of sensation, representation, responsiveness, and feedback loops. Nor would a requirement of contiguity appear to be motivated within the general spirit of his account. A sensory signal travels inward along a nerve from the bodily surface to the central tangle. Perhaps a species could evolve that sends its nerve signals by lightwave instead, along hollow reflective capillaries, saving precious milliseconds of response time. Perhaps this adaptation then allows a further adaptation in which peripheral parts can temporarily detach from the central body while still sending their light signals to targeted receptors. You can see how this adaptation could be useful for ambushing prey or reaching into long, narrow spaces. Viola, discontinuous organisms! Nothing in Humphrey's account seems to motivate ruling such possibilities out. Humphrey should allow that beings with discontinuous bodies can, at least in principle, have spatially distributed sensory surfaces that communicate their disturbances to the center of the organism and whose behavior is in turn governed by signals outbound from the center. He should allow the possibility of sensation, body, and the me/not-me distinction in spatially distributed organisms. And then for consciousness there remains only the question of whether there are sustained, high-fidelity feedback loops within those sensory systems.

So much for in-principle possibility. How about actual consciousness in actually existing distributed organisms? Since Humphrey sets a high bar for "high fidelity", bee colonies still won't qualify as conscious organisms by his standards; their feedback loops won't be high fidelity enough. But how about the United States? I think it will qualify. It will be helpful, however, to consider a cleaner case first: an army division.

An army division has clear boundaries. There are people who are in it and there are people who are outside of it. There's the division on the one hand and the terrain on the other. The division will act to preserve its parts, for example under enemy attack. Disturbances on the periphery (e.g., on the retinas of scouts) will be communicated to the center, and commands from the center will govern behavior at the periphery. If we can set aside prejudice against discontiguous entities and our commonsensical distaste at conceiving of human beings as mere parts of a larger organism, it seems that an army division has a body by Humphrey's general standards.

Does the division also have a sensory system? Again, it seems it should, by Humphrey's standards: Conditions on the periphery are represented by the center, which then governs the behavior of the periphery in response. That's all it takes for the amoeba, and if Humphrey is to be consistent that's all it should take for the division.

Now finally for the condition that Humphrey uses to exclude earthworms and fleas: Does the army division have high-fidelity, temporally extended feedback loops from the sensory periphery to the center? (Alternatively it might have, as in the human case per Humphrey, a more truncated loop from output signals, which needn't actually make it to the periphery, back to the center.) It seems so, at least sometimes. The commander can watch in real time on high-fidelity video as her orders are carried out. She can even stream live satellite video back and forth with her scouts and platoon leaders. Video feeds from the scouts' positions can come high-fidelity in a sustained stream to her eyes. Auditory feeds can return to her ears -- including auditory feeds containing the sound of her own voice issuing commands. For a modern army, there's plenty of opportunity for sustained high-fidelity feedback loops between center and periphery. With good technology, the feedback can be much higher fidelity, higher bandwidth, and more sustained than in the proprioceptive feedback loops I get when I close my eyes and wiggle my finger.

(In his 2011 book, Humphrey gestures toward further complexities of information flow that feedback loops enable (p. 57-59). However, as he suggests, such emergent complexities arise quite naturally once feedback loops are sustained and high-quality, and the same will presumably be true for some such feedback loops in an army division. In any case, since such remarks are gestural rather than fully developed, I focus primarily on the account in Humphrey's 1992 book.)

If I can convince you that a Humphrey-like view implies that army divisions have conscious experience, that's enough for my overall purposes. But to bring it back specifically to the United States: The U.S. has a boundary of me/not-me and a spatially distributed body, in roughly the same way an army division does. In Washington, D.C., it has a center of control of its official actions, which governs behaviors like declaring war, raising tariffs, and sending explorers to the moon. Signals from the periphery (and from the interior too, as in the human case) provide information to the center, and signals from the center command the periphery. And with modern technology, the feedback loops can be high fidelity, high bandwidth, temporally sustained, and almost arbitrarily complex. Humphrey's criteria are all met. Humphrey should abandon his apparent bias against discontinuous organisms and accept that the United States is literally conscious.

Update, March 13:
Readers might be interested to Nick Humphrey's reply in the comments section and the exchange between Nick and me that grows out of it.

The Instability of Professional Philosophers' Endorsement of the Famous "Doctrine of the Double Effect"

People's responses to hypothetical moral scenarios can vary substantially depending on the order in which those scenarios are presented (e.g., Lombrozo 2009). Consider the well-known "Switch" and "Push" versions of The Trolley Problem. In the Switch version, an out-of-control boxcar is headed toward five people whom it will kill if nothing is done. You're standing by a railroad switch, and you can divert the boxcar onto a side-track, saving the five people. However, there's one person on the side-track, who would then be killed. Many respondents will say that there's nothing morally wrong with flipping the switch, killing the one to save the five. Some will even say that you're morally obliged to flip the switch. In the Push version, instead of being able to save the five by flipping a switch, you can do so by pushing a heavy man into the path of the boxcar, killing him but saving the five as his weight slows the boxcar. Despite the surface similarity to the Switch case, most people think it's not okay to push the man.

Here's the order effect: If you present the Push case first, people are much less likely to say it's okay to flip the switch when you then later present the Switch case than if you present the Switch case first. In one study, Fiery Cushman and I found that if we presented Push first, respondents tended to rate the two cases equivalently (on a seven-point scale from "extremely morally good" to "extremely morally bad"). But if we presented Switch first, only about half the respondents rated the scenarios equivalently. Somewhat simplified: People who see Push first will say that it's morally bad to push the man, and then when they see Switch they will say it's similarly bad to flip the switch. People who see Switch first will say it's okay to flip the switch, but then when they see the Push case they don't say "Oh, I guess that's okay too". Rather, they dig in their heels and say that pushing the man is bad despite the superficial similarity to the Switch case, and thus they rate the two scenarios inequivalently.

Strikingly, Fiery and I found that professional philosophers show the same size order effects on their judgment about hypothetical scenarios as do non-philosophers. Even when we restricted our analysis to respondents reporting a PhD in philosophy and an area of specialization or competence in ethics, we found no overall reduction of the magnitude of the order effect. (This research is forthcoming in Mind & Language; manuscript draft available here.)

The Doctrine of the Double Effect is the orthodox (but by no means universally accepted) explanation of why it might be okay to flip the switch but not okay to push the man. According to the Doctrine of the Double Effect, it's worse to harm someone as a means of bringing about a good outcome than it is to harm someone as merely a foreseen side-effect of bringing about a good outcome. Applied to the trolley case, the thought is this: If you flip the switch, the means of saving the five is diverting the boxcar to the side-track, and the death of the one person is just a foreseen side effect. However, if you push the man, killing him is the means of saving the five.

Now maybe this is a sound doctrine, soundly applied, or maybe not. But what Fiery and I did was this: At the end of our experiment, we asked our participants whether they endorsed the Doctrine of the Double Effect. Specifically we asked the following:

Sometimes it is necessary to use one person’s death as a means to saving several more people—killing one helps you accomplish the goal of saving several. Other times one person’s death is a side-effect of saving several more people—the goal of saving several unavoidably ends up killing one as a consequence. Is the first morally better, worse, or the same as the second?

[Response options: ‘better’ ‘worse’ or ‘same’]

Non-philosophers' responses to this question were unrelated to the order of the presentation of the scenarios. We suspect that many of them didn't see the connection between this abstract principle and the Push and Switch scenarios presented much earlier in the questionnaire. But philosophers' responses were related to the order of presentation of the Push and Switch scenarios. Specifically, the majority of philosophers (62%) who saw the Switch scenario first endorsed the Doctrine of the Double Effect. However, the doctrine was endorsed only by a minority of philosophers (46%) who saw Push first (p = .02). What seems to have happened is this: By manipulating order of presentation, Fiery and I influenced the likelihood that respondents would rate the scenarios equivalently or inequivalently. We thereby also influenced the likelihood of our philosopher respondents' endorsing a doctrine that appears to justify inequivalent judgments about the scenarios, the Doctrine of the Double Effect. Rather than relying on stable principles to reach judgments about the cases, a certain portion of philosophers appear to have reached their scenario judgments on the basis of covert factors like order of presentation and then endorsed principles only post-hoc as a means of rationalizing their covertly influenced judgments about the specific cases.

Manipulating the order of two pairs of scenarios (a Push-Switch case and a Moral Luck case) appeared to amplify the magnitude of this effect, by pushing philosophers either generally toward or generally against endorsing inequivalency-supporting principles. With two scenario pairs ordered to favor inequivalency, we found 70% of our philosopher respondents endorsing the Doctrine of the Double Effect. With the two pairs ordered to favor equivalency, only 28% endorsed the doctrine (p < .001). This is a very large shift in opinion, given how well-known the doctrine is among philosophers and given that by this point in the questionnaire, all philosophers had viewed all versions of each scenario. We then filtered our results, looking only at respondents reporting a PhD and an area of specialization or competence in ethics, thinking that these high-grade specialists (mostly ethics professors at Leiter-ranked institutions) might have more stable opinions about the Doctrine of the Double Effect. They didn't. When the two scenario pairs were arranged to favor inequivalency, 62% of ethics PhDs endorsed the Doctrine of the Double Effect. When the two pairs were arranged to favor equivalency, 29% endorsed the doctrine (p < .05).

The simplest interpretation of our overall results, across three types of scenarios (Double Effect, Moral Luck, and Action-Omission), is that in cases like these skill in philosophy doesn't manifest as skill in consistently applying explicitly endorsed abstract principles to reach stable judgments about hypothetical scenarios; rather, it manifests more as skill in choosing principles to rationalize, post-hoc, scenario judgments that are driven by the same types of factors that drive non-philosophers' judgments.

Cohen and Dennett on Reportability and Consciousness

I was struck by the following imaginary dialogue in a recent article by Michael Cohen and Daniel Dennett. In the dialogue, P is a patient and F&L are Fahrenfort and Lamme, the targets of C&D's critique.

F&L: ‘You are conscious of the redness of the apple.’

P: ‘I am? I don’t see any color. It just looks grey. Why do you think I’m consciously experiencing red?’

F&L: ‘Because we can detect recurrent processing in color areas in your visual cortex.’

P: ‘But I really don’t see any color. I see the apple, but nothing colored. Yet you still insist that I am conscious of the color red?’

F&L: ‘Yes, because local recurrency correlates with conscious awareness.’

P: ‘Doesn’t it mean something that I am telling you I’m not experiencing red at all? Doesn’t that suggest local recurrency itself isn’t sufficient for conscious awareness?’

I think we are meant to find F&L's insistence preposterous, or at least misguided.

Is it preposterous or misguided? I feel the attraction of saying so. But imagine this parallel case, in which the patient's report is of a visually seen object and the scientists are speaking to the patient from another room in the building:

Scientists: ‘You are looking directly at an apple that is on the table two feet in front of you.’

Participant: ‘I am? I don’t see an apple. It just looks like an empty table. Why do you think I’m looking at an apple?’

S: ‘Because we put the apple there, and we are monitoring it with a suite of video cameras and other devices [fill in further convincing details].’

P: ‘But I really don’t see an apple. I see the table, but no apple on it. Yet you still insist that there's an apple there?’

S: ‘Yes, because [repeat suite of persuasive empirical evidence].’

P: ‘Doesn’t it mean something that I am telling you I’m not seeing the apple? Doesn’t that suggest that your video cameras, etc., are broken?’

[Update, Mar. 16: Just to be clear: The dispute I am imagining is not about P's mental life. It's about the fact of whether there is actually an apple on the table.]

Here's my thought: This is a fairly bizarre situation. One wonders if the scientists' cameras are broken after all. But whether to believe the scientists or the participant is going to depend on further details. How trustworthy is the scientists' equipment? Is there some plausible reason to think the participant might really be mistaken? For example, what if the participant had been given a post-hypnotic suggestion? What if the participant were viewing the apple monocularly and the apple were being manipulated so as to remain always in the participant's blind spot? Then we might have excellent reason to believe the scientists over the participant.

I would suggest that the introspective case is epistemically similar. It doesn't hands-down favor the patient. It depends on the details. It depends on such things as the trustworthiness of the external measure of consciousness and whether a reasonable explanation of the patient's error is available. We should not, contra Cohen's and Dennett's apparent intention, conclude from this thought experiment that self-reports of experience are in any strong sense "incorrigible".

(Dennett and I have already gone around a few times on this issue: here and here and here.)

Update, March 13:
Cohen and Dennett have given me permission to post the following reply on their behalf:

Thanks to everyone for the comments! Here are just a few points of clarification of our view.

For us, the subject's words are not the ultimate criterion or touchstone of consciousness. Not at all! Change blindness and inattentional blindness and many other phenomena demonstrate how people often overestimate their knowledge of their own experiences. But if we want to understand everyday subjective experience—and that is what people have in mind generally when they speak of consciousness—we have to start with the understanding that in general people have access to their own experience! But theorists like Block, Lamme, and colleagues want to go a step beyond that. They want to say that there are conscious experiences that you can't even access yourself. In other words, there are experiences that you can't talk about, you can't report, you can't remember, you can't make decisions about, you can't plan to act in one way or another because of, and even if you're directly probed, you will still not realize you're having it. (This is what Block and Lamme mean when they insist that there can be phenomenal consciousness without access consciousness. (See Lamme, 2003 TICS where he talks about conscious states you can't access or realize you're having).

We do not at all deny that there are instances in which a scientist can make observations about a subject's neural state that the subject can't report. There are too many instances in the scientific literature to list here. For example, it's easy with current technology to measure fluctuations in primary visual cortex (V1) using fMRI to which the subject has no access. Not only can he not report the change in his V1, he can't even recognize something on the screen is changing that is causing those neural changes. The idea that subjective report is the only tool we have for consciousness studies is not at all our view. Our view is that there are two quite well established categories: conscious experiences to which subjects have access, and unconscious processes to which they do not have access. If Block and Lamme want to propose a new category of phenomenal consciousness with no access, they must motivate it. How are they proposing to distinguish it from unconscious activity? In virtue of what properties are the phenomena at issue rightly called conscious? Freud proposed a similar distinction, between totally unconscious and “preconscious” activities, and more recently Dehaene et al (TICS 2006) have updated that proposal with a carefully defended taxonomy of sublimininal, preconscious and conscious activity. Are Block and Lamme proposing to simply rename Dehaene et al’s ‘preconscious’ category as phenomenal consciousness? If so, what don’t they like about the term ‘preconscious’? If not, if they want their taxonomy to compete with this taxonomy, they need to tell us what special features mark the phenomenally conscious but unaccessed activities from Dehaene et al’s preconscious activities.

[For a few of my (ES's) thoughts in reaction, see the comments section, March 13.]

Experimental Philosophy Institute 2012

Faculty who want NEH to pay for them to spend this July in Tucson studying experimental philosophy with some of the top experimental philosophers should check this out.

Tucson in July? I told you x-phi is hot!

New Blog on the Philosophy of Cosmology

... here. Over the last few years, I've found my thoughts about the epistemology of metaphysics leading me more toward the philosophy of cosmology (e.g., my "Crazyism" essay, section xii here, and my reflections on solipsism on the the Sims argument.) So it's nice to see the philosophy of cosmology project starting to take off.

Faux Philosophy News

... humorous philosophy blog, off to a hilarious start.

4th Online Consciousness Conference

has begun and will run through March 2nd. Check it out!

Why Dretske Should Think That the United States Is Conscious

Last week, I argued that Daniel Dennett should think that the United States is conscious. That is, I argued that Dennett should think that the United States has a stream of experience in the same sense that you and I have streams of experience, or in other words that "there's something it's like" to be the United States. Today, I'll say the same about Fred Dretske. As I mentioned in discussing Dennett, these reflections aren't intended as refutations of their views. I think we should seriously consider the possibility that the United States is literally conscious.

Dretske presents what is perhaps the leading philosophical account of the nature of representation, and he also offers one of the leading representationalist theories of consciousness. Dretske and Dennett offer perhaps the two most prominent top-to-bottom materialistic philosophical accounts of the metaphysics of consciousness, which is why I have chosen them for this exercise.

Let's start with representation. On Dretske's view, a system represents that x is F just in case that system has a subsystem with the function of entering state A only if x is F and that subsystem is in state A. Dretske's examples of systems with indicator functions include both artificial systems like fuel gauges and natural biological systems.

So we need to think a little bit about what a "system" is. Intuitive application of the label "system" wouldn't seem to exclude the United States. We can think of a traffic system or a social system or the military-industrial complex as a system. Systems, I'd be inclined to think, can be spatially distributed, as long as there is some sort of regular, predictable interaction among their parts. There seems to be no reason, on Dretske's view, not to treat the United States as a system. Dretske does not appear to employ restrictive criteria, such as a requirement of spatial contiguity, on what qualifies as a system. In fact, it would strain against the general spirit of Dretske's view to employ something like spatial contiguity as a criterion of systemhood: Something like a fuel gauge could easily operate via radio communication among its parts and that would make no difference to Dretske's basic analysis. What matters for Dretske are things like information and causation, not adjacency of parts.

If the United States is a system, then it can presumably at least be evaluated for the presence or absence of representations. And once it is evaluated in this way it seems clear that, by Dretske's criteria, the United States does in fact possess representations. The United States has subsystems with indicator functions. The Census Bureau is part of the United States and one of its functions is to tally up the residents. The CIA is part of the United States and one of its functions is to track the location of enemies.

Dretske is very liberal in granting "behavior" to systems: Even plants behave, on his view (e.g., by growing), and in some sense even stones (e.g., by sinking when thrown in a pond). So it seems clear if we grant that the United States is a system with representations, it also exhibits behavior that is influenced by those representations. Dretske's metaphysics, straightforwardly applied, would seem to imply that the United States is a behaving, self-representing system.

But would this behaving, representing system have conscious experience, on Dretske's view? Dretske says that in order to have conscious sensory experience, a system must possess representations that are (a.) natural, (b.) systemic, and (c.) enable the construction of new representations that can be calibrated to regulate behavior serving the system's needs and desires. Let's consider these criteria one at a time, b, c, and then a.

Does the U.S. have "systemic" representations? Systemic representations, per Dretske, are representations that are part of the very design of the system or subsystem, rather than representations acquired later. It seems clear that the United States has these, if it has representations at all. It's among the systemic functions of the Census Bureau that it tally up the residents. It's among the systemic functions of the Supreme Court that it represent laws as Constitutional or un-Constitutional. The systemic representations of these subsystems deliver behavior-guiding information to the system as a whole, as the systemic representations of an animal's sensory subsystems do.

Can the United States construct new representations derived from these systemic representations to further regulate its behavior? It seems clear it can. The United States, or a subsystem within the United States, could represent its rate of population growth among newly-defined demographic groups and adjust immigration policy in response. Does it do so in accord with its needs and desires? Well, needs and desires, on Dretske's account, don't require a lot of apparatus. A desire for some result R, per Dretske, is an internal state that (a.) helps cause movement that helps to yield R, (b.) was selected for because of that tendency to help yield R, and (c.) can be further modified conditionally upon its effectiveness in producing R, in a somewhat sophisticated way. Though these conditions rule out the inflexible inherited drives of many insects, this is still pretty simple stuff, as Dretske intends. The Census Bureau, the CIA, and the United States as a whole would seem to have desires by Dretske's criteria.

Finally, does the United States have "natural" representations that play the necessary roles? This might seem to be a sticking point. Dretske defines conventional representations as those arising when "a thing's informational functions are derived from the intentions and purposes of its designers, builders, and users" -- that is, "us" -- and he defines natural representations as just those that are not conventional (1995, p. 7-8). Now clearly the informational functions of the United States depend on us. They wouldn't exist without us. Does that mean, then, that Dretske can dodge the conclusion that the U.S. is conscious?

I don't think so. After all, your own informational functions depend on you, wouldn't exist without you, and you're conscious. The motivation for Dretske's requirement seems to be that to give rise to consciousness a system's representational functions should be intrinsic to it, rather than assigned from outside. When you slap a label on a column of mercury and call it a thermometer, you don't thereby make the thermometer conscious (even if it were complex enough to meet the other criteria). But the case of the thermometer and the U.S. are not at all analogous. U.S. citizens aren't external label-slappers. We are parts of the United States. We constitute it. We are internal to it. Although Dretske implicitly assumes that if a system's representational capacities depend on human beings then those capacities are not natural to the system, it's clear that in saying this he has ordinary physical artifacts in mind, not cases where human users themselves constitute (part of) the system.

The core idea of Dretske's metaphysics of mind is that minds are information-manipulating systems, where information is construed in terms of simple causes and probabilities, and where mentality and consciousness arise when a system's environmental responsiveness and its tracking of the world are intrinsically sophisticated and flexible. If we can set aside our natural prejudice against large, spatially distributed systems, it seems clear that the United States amply satisfies Dretskean criteria for conscious mentality.

A 15-Minute Survey on Stereotypes about Philosophy

by the good folks at Sheffield, here.

The Surprising and Disappointing Predictors of Success in UCR's Philosophy PhD Program

Well, surprising and disappointing to me at least! You might be neither surprised or disappointed.

Here's the background: I'm on the UCR Philosophy PhD admissions committee again this year. I'm a fan of treating senior-year GPA in philosophy as a crucially important part of an application. Here's the kind of thing I tend to say to other members of the admissions committee: "For each A-minus, imagine an unwritten letter saying that this student isn't quite top notch and not really ready for a PhD program in philosophy". I'm also a fan of not putting too much weight on the reputation of students' undergrad institutions. I'm cheering for the Cal State underdogs. And the GRE I'm inclined to regard as having no predictive value once GPA, writing sample, and letters of recommendation are factored in. (I compare GRE to the bench press as a predictor of athletic performance. If you knew nothing else, it would be somewhat predictive, but once you've seen the person in the field, it really doesn't matter.)

Being an empirically-minded philosopher, though, I'm not happy with mere armchair plausibility. So I thought I could give extra weight to my arguments by looking at how current UCR grad-student performance relates to undergrad GPA, to undergrad institution of origin, and to GRE scores. The staff in the department office kindly provided me with data for all grad students from the entering class of 2007 to the present. This is only 37 students total (with some missing cells), but I thought I might at least pick up some trends. My two measures of academic success at UCR are GPA in the program (setting 3.5 as a floor because of two outliers with some Fs) and whether the student dropped out of the program.

It looks like everything I thought I knew is wrong.

I couldn't make undergrad GPA predictive. I tried several different ways. I tried including undergrad GPA for all students and I tried excluding those who had done some master's work before coming to UCR. When overall GPA didn't work I asked the staff to recode the data with just senior-year GPA in philosophy courses. Still no correlation. Maybe on a much larger sample GPA would show up as predictive, but on this sample it's not even close, not even close to close.

Two important caveats: First, all the students had excellent undergrad GPAs (except for one who repaired with a Master's degree). We're comparing 3.7's vs. 3.9's here, not 3.0's vs. 3.9's. In philosophy courses, their GPAs are even better: Median senior year philosophy GPA was 3.91. So surely this is a ceiling effect of some sort. Still, in my mind, 50% A-minuses in senior-year philosophy looks very different in a PhD application than does straight A's in senior-year philosophy. I would have thought the second sort of student much more promising overall. Second: The students with relatively lower GPA's who were nonetheless admitted (and thus the only students in this sample) presumably had especially excellent letters and writing samples, to help compensate for their disadvantage in GPA relative to other applicants. So maybe that's the explanation. (See, I just can't abandon my opinion!)

Equally annoyingly, given my biases, the verbal section of the GRE was highly predictive. (Math was not predictive.) Verbal GRE score correlates at .49 with graduate student GPA in Philosophy at UCR (p = .004). Our students' median verbal GRE score is 680. Those who scored above median have a mean UCR GPA of 3.91. Those who scored median or below have a mean UCR GPA of 3.76 (t test, p = .001). (Yes, we mostly give our PhD students grades ranging from B+ to A. If you're getting mostly A-minuses and B-pluses in our program, you're "struggling".) This shows up especially strikingly in a 2x2 split-half analysis. 11/14 (79%) of students with above-median verbal GREs have above-median GPAs in our program, while only 5/18 (28%) of students with at-or-below-median verbal GREs have above-median GPAs in our program (chi-square, p = .004).

There was also a trend for overall GRE score to predict sticking with the program: Dropouts had a mean GRE of 1243. Non-dropouts had a mean GRE of 1385. (This was not statistically significant, partly because the dropout group had much higher GRE variance, messing up straightforward application of the t test; p = .13, p = .01 assuming equal variances.)

And reputation of undergrad institution was predictive of GPA in our program. Students whose undergrad institution is a US News top-50 National University or top-25 National Liberal Arts College had a mean 3.91 GPA at UCR, while those not from those elite institutions had a mean GPA of 3.77 (t test, p = .01, equal variance not assumed).

The one bright spot for my preconceptions was this: Students with graduate-level training (usually an MA) before entering UCR tended to do well in the program. Their GPA was 3.87, compared to 3.77 for students with no prior graduate-level training (t test, p = .06); and they were much less likely to drop out: 1/18 (6%) vs. 8/19 (42%) (chi-square, p = .01).

I'm tempted to claim the philosopher's prerogative of rejecting empirical evidence I don't like and sticking with my armchair intuitions. Surely there's something in Kant I can use to prove a priori from principles of pure reason that undergrad GPA is more important than GRE! One thought is this: Since we don't take GRE very seriously in admissions and we do take undergrad GPA very seriously, whatever predictiveness GRE has isn't washed out through the admissions process in the way that the predictive value of GPA probably is to some extent washed out (per caveat 2 in the GPA discussion). If we started taking GRE very seriously in admissions, its predictive value among admitted students might vanish, since those with low GREs would have to be all the more excellent in the other dimensions of their application.

I'd be interested to hear if other professors at PhD have similar data, and whether they find similar results.

Why Dennett Should Think That the United States Is Conscious

If you're reading this, you probably know who Dan Dennett is. His book Consciousness Explained is probably the best-known contemporary philosophical work on consciousness from a materialist perspective. Today I'll argue that Dennett should, by his own lights, accept the view that the United States is conscious -- that is, the view that the United States has a stream of subjective experience over and above the individual experiences of its residents and citizens, the view that there's "something it's like" to be the United States, as truly as there is something it's like to be you and me.

I offer these reflections not as an attempted refutation of Dennett's view. I think that the literal consciousness of the United States is a real possibility that merits serious consideration.

To start, Dennett is liberal about entityhood. In his essay "Real Patterns", Dennett accepts the real or real-enough existence of things like the his "lost sock center", the center of the smallest sphere than can be inscribed around all the socks he has ever lost. Dennett also appears comfortable with spatially distributed thinking subjects whose parts are connected by radio signals (e.g., Ned Block's Chinese Nation, accepted as conscious in Consciousness Explained, and a fictionalized version of himself in his essay "Where Am I?"). Dennett should have no trouble granting that the United States is a real or real-enough entity that could at least potentially have mental states.

And Dennett is similarly liberal about the ascription of beliefs and desires. In Dennett's view, as long as an entity is usefully describable as possessing beliefs and desires and acting rationally upon them -- as long as belief-desire ascriptions capture some pattern in the entity's behavior that would be left out or much more difficult to see without the help of belief-desire ascriptions -- then that entity has beliefs and desires. Even chess-playing computers qualify. (See especially his book The Intentional Stance.) It seems clear that the United States is usefully describable as having beliefs and desires. The United States wants Iran to cease pursuing nuclear technology. The United States believes that stable democracies make better international partners than do Islamic theocracies.

Thus, it seems clear that Dennett should accept that the United States is a real entity with real beliefs and desires. Ascribing attitudes to this entity helpfully captures "real patterns" in world politics. This isn't an especially unusual view in contemporary philosophy. What's highly unusual is ascribing literal consciousness to group entities.

And about consciousness Dennett is conservative. He's hesitant to ascribe full-blown consciousness even to non-human mammals. He argues that consciousness is a vague-bordered concept from folk psychology that begins to break down when applied to their simpler minds (e.g., here).

Why does consciousness-talk break down, exactly, on Dennett's view? Dennett argues that consciousness requires being an agent with a point of view. That is, consciousness requires "private, perspectival, interior ways of being apprised of some limited aspects of the wider world and our bodies' relations to it"; and this point of view should be conceivably shapable into a narrative if the entity could talk (for the quote, see here, p. 173). That sounds pretty fancy! But it's clear that Dennett intends "private", "perspectival", and "point of view" minimalistically in remarks of this sort, rather than with the full trappings of robust humanocentrism. This minimalism is evident from his assertion that even cherry trees and microphones meet a first-pass application of these criteria. For Dennett, what distinguishes human beings, fully capable of conscious experience, from beings incapable of consciousness and beings in the gray zone, is that the kind of environmental responsiveness possessed by cherry trees and simple robots is directed simply outward, whereas our own responsiveness is also directed at our own states, in complex, recursive, self-regulating loops.

So the question, then, for the Dennettian view, is whether the United States is a gray-zone case in this respect, or whether it has a sufficiently sophisticated perspective on its own internal states. Is its play of representation and responsiveness massively simpler than that of a conscious human being, on the order of the organization of a non-human mammal? Or is its recursive, complex self-sensitivity roughly human magnitude or more? The latter seems the more plausible. The United States, considered as a single, massive system, is vastly complex, arguably embracing within it much of the complexity of each human being who helps compose it. The complex and self-referential structures internal to citizens' minds, and between citizens in conversation, feeds our choices of President, our decisions to war, our environmental policies. That the people of the United States don't agree but adopt multiple competing perspectives is no objection here, and in fact fits very nicely with Dennett's remarks about consciousness involving multiple drafts and "fame in the brain". Both in the U.S. and in the individual human mind, subsystems with inconsistent perspectives compete for control of behavior and meaning-making.

Dennett emphasizes the importance of language and narratives in generating the complexities necessary for consciousness. And the United States exudes language. It apologizes to the descendants of slaves. It announces official foreign policies. It promises to reduce global warming. This isn't the same thing as any single individual apologizing, announcing, or promising, or any several individuals doing so in unison. It's one thing for Obama to apologize and quite another for the U.S. to apologize, even if the U.S. does so using Obama's mouth.

The U.S. even seems to generate "heterophenomenological" self-reports about the processes by which it reaches its beliefs and decides among its actions. We can ask the Census Bureau about its methods for counting residents. We can ask the National Archives and Records Administration how the President is chosen. Congressional leaders sometimes (dubiously) describe the methods by which the governing body has reached its decisions. Dennett seems happy to count even simple computer outputs as "heterophenomenological reports", if they present themselves as descriptions of the computer's internal workings (e.g., "Shakey" in Consciousness Explained, "Cog" in "The Case for Rorts" -- though actually existing robot systems may still be too simple to be literally conscious on Dennett's view). I see no Dennettian grounds for excluding bureaucratic self-descriptions as heterophenomenological reports, by the United States, of its internal workings. Indeed, few if any of us achieve bureaucratic heights of linguistic self-report.

Since Dennett has a generally pragmatic attitude about mental-state ascriptions, one potential Dennettian hesitation is that ascribers might too swiftly leap from what they think they know about human consciousness to conclusions about the conscious experiences of the United States. If you're upset about Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, there might be some physiological changes in your stomach that contribute to your experience. If the U.S. is upset about Iran's pursuit of nuclear technology, its internal changes will be structurally rather different. But the correct advice here should be pragmatic caution in our heterophenomenological explorations. The same caution would be required if we met cognitively sophisticated aliens very structurally different from us. The same caution would be required in evaluating robots capable of outputs that are linguistically interpretable as sophisticated self-reports of their internal workings -- robots that Dennett argues should be viewed as conscious (e.g., in "The Case for Rorts").

I conclude that philosophers of a broadly Dennettian bent should accept that the United States has a stream of experience in the same sense that you and I do. That we tend to think otherwise, they should say, is merely evolutionarily and developmentally comprehensible, but theoretically ungrounded, morphological prejudice against discontiguous entities.

[Revised Feb. 10.]

Steinblog

A new blog targeted at philosophy students, by Jesse Steinberg at Pitt-Bradford.

The Egg Came First

It is only natural that, when confronted with timeless and confounding questions, your friends should turn to you, the philosopher. Sooner or later, then, they will ask you which came first, the chicken or the egg. You must be prepared to discuss this issue in pedantic depth or lose your reputation for intimidating scholarly acumen. Only after understanding this issue will you be prepared for even deeper and more troubling questions such as "Is water wet? Or is water only something that makes other things wet?"

The question invites us to consider a sequence of the following sort, stretching back in time: chicken, egg, chicken, egg, chicken.... The first term of the series can be chosen arbitrarily. The question is the terminus. If one assumes an infinite past and everlasting species, there may be no terminus. However, the cosmological assumptions behind such a view are highly doubtful. Therefore, it seems, there must be a terminus member of the series, temporally first, either a chicken or an egg. The question which came first is often posed rhetorically as though it were obvious that there could be no good epistemic grounds for choice. However, as I aim to show, this appearance of irresolvability is misleading. The egg came first.

Young Earth Creationist views merit brief treatment. If God created chickens on the Fourth Day along with "every kind of winged creature", then the question is whether He chose to create the chicken first, the egg first, both types simultaneously, or a being at the very instant of transition between egg and chicken (when it is arguably either both or neither). The question thus dissolves into the general mystery of God's will. Textual evidence somewhat favors either the chicken or both, since God said "let birds fly above the earth" and the Bible then immediately states "and so it was", before transition to the Fifth Day. So at least some winged creatures were already flying on the Fourth Day, and one day is ordinarily insufficient time for eggs to mature into flying birds. Since chickens aren't much prone to fly, though, it's dubious whether such observations extend to them, unless God implemented a regular rule in which winged creatures were created either mature or simultaneously in a mix of mature and immature states. And in any case, it is granted on all sides that events were unusual and not subject to the normal laws of development during the first Six Days.

If we accept the theory of evolution, as I think we should, then the chicken derives from a lineage that ultimately traces back to non-chickens. (The issues here are the same whether we consider the domestic chicken to be its own species or whether we lump it together with the rest of gallus gallus including the Red Junglefowl from which the domestic chicken appears to be mostly descended.) The first chicken arose either as a hybrid of two non-chickens or via mutation from a non-chicken. Consider the mutation case first. It's improbable (though not impossible) that between any two generations in avian history, X and X-1, there would be enough differentiation for a clean classification of X as a chicken and X-1 as a non-chicken. Thus we appear to have a Sorites case. Just as it seems that adding one grain to a non-heap can't make it a heap, resulting in the paradox that no addition of single grains could ever make a heap, so also one might worry that one generation's difference could never (at least with any realistic likelihood) make the difference between a chicken and a non-chicken, resulting in the paradox of chickens in the primordial soup.

Now there are things philosophers can do about these paradoxes. Somehow heaps arise, despite the argument above. One simple approach is epistemicism, according to which there really is a sharp line in the world such that X-1 is a non-heap and X is a heap, X-1 is a non-chicken and X is a chicken. On this view, our inability to discern this line is merely an epistemic failure on our part. Apparent vagueness is really only ignorance. Another simple approach is to allow that there really are vague properties in the world that defy classification in the two-valued logic of true and false. On this view, between X, which is definitely a chicken, and X-N, which is definitely a non-chicken, there are some vague cases of which it is neither true nor false that it is a chicken, or somehow both true and false, or somewhere between true and false, or something like that. There are also more complicated views, too, than these, but we needn't enter them, because one key point remains the same across all these Sorites approaches: The Sorites cases progress not as follows: X chicken, X-1 egg, X-2 chicken, X-3 egg, X-4 chicken.... Rather, they progress in chicken-egg pairs. From a genetic perspective, since the chicken and egg share DNA, they form a single Sorites unit. Within this unit, the egg clearly comes first, since the chicken is born from the egg, sharing its DNA, and there is a DNA difference between the egg and the hen from which that egg is laid. For a ridiculous argument to the contrary, see here.

If we turn to the possibility of speciation by hybridization, similar considerations apply.

A much poorer argument for the same conclusion runs as follows: Whatever ancestor species gave rise to chickens presumably laid eggs. Therefore, there were eggs long before there were chickens. Therefore, the egg came first. The weakness in this argument is that it misconstrues the original question. The question is not "Which came first, chickens or eggs?" but rather "Which came first, the first chicken or the first chicken egg?"

However, the poverty of this last argument does raise vividly the issue of how one assigns eggs to species. The egg-first conclusion could be evaded if we typed eggs by reference to the mother: If the mother is a chicken, the egg is a chicken egg; if the mother is not a chicken, the egg is not a chicken egg. David Papineau succinctly offers the two relevant considerations against such a view here. First, if we type by DNA, which would seem to be the default biological standard, the egg shares more of its DNA with the hatchling than with its parent. Second, as anyone can see via intuitive armchair reflection on a priori principles: "If a kangaroo laid an egg from which an ostrich hatched, that would surely be an ostrich egg, not a kangaroo egg."

(HT: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, who in turn credited Roy Sorenson.)

Update, Feb. 2:
In the comments, Papineau reveals that he has recanted in light of considerations advanced by Mohan Matthen in his important but so far sadly neglected "Chicken, Eggs, and Speciation" -- considerations also briefly mentioned by Ron Mallon in his comment. Although I find merit in these remarks, I am not convinced and I believe Papineau has abandoned the egg-first view too precipitously.

Matthen argues that: "Speciation occurs when a population comes to be reproductively isolated because the last individual that formerly bridged that population to others died, or because this individual ceased to be fertile (or when other integrating factors cease to operate)" (2009, p. 110). He suggests that this event will normally occur when both soon-to-be-chickens and soon-to-be-chicken-eggs exist in the population. Thus, he concludes, a whole population of chickens and eggs is simultaneously created in a single instant. In assessing this view let me note first that depending on the size of the population and its egg-laying habits, this view might suggest a likelihood of chickens first. Suppose that in a small population of ancestral pre-chickens the last bridge individual dies outside of laying season; or suppose that the end of an individual's last laying season marks the end of an individual's fertility. If there are no out-of-season eggs at the crucial moment, then chickens came first.

More importantly, however, Matthen's criterion of speciation leads to highly counterintuitive and impractical results. Matthen defines reproductive isolation between populations in terms of the probability of gene transfer between those populations. (Also relevant to his distinction is the shape of the graph of the likelihood of gene transfer by number of generations, but that complication isn't relevant to the present issue.) But probability of gene transfer can be very sharply affected by factors that don't seem to create comparably sizable influences on species boundaries. So, for example, when human beings migrated to North America, the probability of gene transfer with the ancestral population declined sharply, and soon became essentially zero (and in any case in excess of the probability of gene transfer between geographically coincident hybridizing species). By Matthen's criterion, this would be a speciating event. After Columbus, gene transfer probability slowly rose and by now gene transfer is very high between individuals with Native American ancestry and those without. Thus, by Matthen's criterion, Native Americans were for several thousand years a distinct species -- not homo sapiens! -- and now they are homo sapiens again. If the moment of change was Columbus's first landing (or some other discrete moment), then the anchoring of a ship, or some other event, perhaps a romantic interlude between Pocahontas and John Smith, caused everyone on the two continents simultaneously to change species!

More simply, we might imagine a chicken permanently trapped in an inescapable cage. Its probability of exchanging genes with other individuals is now zero. Since Matthen allows for species consisting of a single individual, this chicken has now speciated. Depending on how we interpret the counterfactual probabilities, we might even imagine opening and shutting the door repeatedly (perhaps due to some crazy low-probability event) causing that individual to flash repeatedly back and forth between being a chicken and being a non-chicken, with no differences in morphology, actual behavior, location, or sexual preference during the period. On the surface, it seems that Matthen's criterion might even result in all infertile individuals belonging to singleton species.

There are both philosophical and practical biological reasons not to lightly say that individuals may change species during their lifetimes. One consideration is that of animal identity. If I point at an individual chicken and ask at what point the entity at which I am pointing ceases to exist, there are good practical (and maybe metaphysical) reasons to think that the entity does not cease to exist when a single feather falls off, nor to think that it continues to exist despite being smushed into gravy. The most natural and practical approach, it seems, is to say that the entity to which I intend to refer (in the normal case) is essentially a chicken and thus that it continues to exist exactly as long as it remains a chicken. Consequently, on the assumption that the individual pre-chicken avians don't cease to exist when they become reproductively isolated, they remain non-chickens despite overall changes in the makeup of the avian population. (These individuals may, nonetheless, give birth to chickens.) Nor does it seem that any important scientific biological purpose would be served by requiring the relabeling of individual organisms, depending on population movements, once those organisms are properly classified. Long-enduring organisms, such as trees, seem best classified as members of the ancestral population they were born into, even if their species has moved on since. Long-lived individuals can remain as living remnants of the ancestral species -- a species with temporally ragged but individual-respecting borders. The attractiveness of this view is especially evident if we consider the possibility of thawing a long-frozen dinosaur egg.

Matthen argues as follows against the those who embrace either an egg-first or a chicken-first view: The first chicken would need to have descendants by breeding with a non-chicken, but since by definition species are reproductively isolated this view leads to contradiction. This consequence is easily evaded with the right theory of vagueness and a suitable interpretation of the reproductive isolation criterion. On my preferred theory of vagueness, there will be individuals of which it's neither determinately true nor determinately false that they are chickens. We can then define reproductive isolation as the view that no individual of which it is determinately true that it is a member of species X can reproduce with an individual of which it is determinately false that it is a member of species X. As long as all breeding is between determinate members and individuals in the indeterminate middle, the reproductive isolation criterion is satisfied. (This is not to concede, however, that species should be defined entirely in terms of reproductive isolation, given the problems in articulating that criterion plausibly, some of which are noted above.)

Second update, Feb. 3:
The issues prove even deeper and more convoluted than I thought! In the comments section, Matthen has posted a reply to my objections, which we pursue for a couple more conversational turns. Although I'm not entirely ready to accept his account of species, I see merit in his thought that the best unit of evaluation might be the population rather than the individual, and if there is a first moment at which the population as a whole becomes a chicken population (rather than speciation involving temporally ragged but individual-respecting borders), then that might be a moment at which multiple avians and possibly multiple avian eggs simultaneously become chickens and chicken eggs.

An anonymous reader raises another point that seems worth developing. If we think of "chickens" not exclusively in terms of their membership in a biologically discriminable species but at least partly in terms of their domestication, then the following considerations might favor a chicken-first perspective. Some act of domestication -- either an act of behavioral training or an act of selection among fowl -- was the last-straw change from non-chickenhood to chickenhood, creating the first chicken. But this act was very likely performed on a newly-hatched or adult bird, not on an egg, since eggs are not trainable and hard to discriminate usefully among. Therefore the first entity in the chicken-egg sequence was a chicken, not an egg. For some reason, I find it much more natural to accept the possibility that a non-chicken could become a chicken mid-life if chickenhood is conceived partly in terms of domestication than if it is conceived entirely as a matter of traditional biological species. (I'm not sure how stable this argument is, however, across different accounts of vagueness.)