Optimism, Repetition, and Hopes for the Size of the Cosmos

I have a new draft paper out! "Repetition and Value in an Infinite Cosmos" -- forthcoming in Stephen Hetherington, Extreme Philosophy (Routledge).

For the full paper (and an abstract), see here. As always, comments, criticisms, and corrections welcome, either as comments here or by email to my academic address.

Below are two sections of the paper, slightly revised for standalone readability.

Optimism, Pessimism, and Hopes for the Size of the Cosmos

The Optimist, let’s say, holds that, at large enough spatiotemporal scales, the good outweighs the bad. Put differently, as the size of a spherical spatiotemporal patch grows extremely large it becomes extremely likely that the good outweighs the bad. Optimism would be defensible on hedonic grounds if the following is plausible: At large enough scales, the total amount of pleasure will almost certainly outweigh the total amount of pain, among whatever inhabitants occupy the region. The Pessimist holds the opposite: At large enough spatiotemporal scales, the bad outweighs the good – perhaps, again, on hedonic grounds, if the pain outweighs the pleasure. A Knife’s-Edge theorist expects a balance.

I see no good hedonic defense of Optimism. Suffering is widespread and might easily balance or outweigh pleasure. I prefer to defend Optimism on eudaimonic grounds: Flourishing lives are valuable, and flourishing lives are virtually guaranteed to occur in sufficiently large spatiotemporal regions.

Imagine a distant planet – one on the far side of the galaxy, blocked by the galactic core, a planet we will never interact with. What ought we hope this planet is like, independent of its relationship to us? Ought we hope that it’s a sterile rock? Or would it be better for the planet to host some sort of life? If the planet hosts some sort of life, would it be best if that life is only simple, microbial life, or would complex life be better – plants, animals, and fungi, savannahs and rainforests and teeming reefs? If it hosts complex life, would it be better if nothing rises to the level of human-like intelligence? Or ought we hope for societies, with families and love and disappointment and anger, poetry and philosophy, art and athletics and politics, triumphs and disasters, heroism and cruelty – the whole package of what is sometimes wonderful and sometimes awful about human existence?

A Pessimist might say the sterile rock is best – or rather, least bad – presumably because it has the least suffering and vice. But I suspect the majority of readers will disagree with the Pessimist. Most, I suspect, will believe, as I do, that complex life is better than simple life, which is better than sterility, and that what’s most worth hoping for is the full suite of love, poetry, philosophy, science, art, and so on. The galaxy overall is better – more awesome, wondrous, and valuable – if it contains a distant planet rich with complex life, a bright spot of importance. If something were to wipe it out or prevent it from starting, that would be a shame and a loss. On this way of thinking, Earth too is a bright spot. As a general matter – perhaps with some miserable exceptions – complex life is not so terrible that nonexistence would be better. The Pessimist is missing something. What form, then, should we hope the cosmos takes?

A benevolent Pessimist might hope for a finite cosmos, on the principle that a finite cosmos contains only finitely much badness, and finite badness is better than infinite badness. (A spiteful Pessimist might hope for infinite badness.) Presumably nothingness would have been even better. A less simple Pessimism might hold that the observable portion of the universe is already infinitely bad. This might entail indifference about the existence or nonexistence of additional regions, depending on whether the infinitudes can be compared. Another less simple Pessimism might suspect that the observable portion of the universe is worse than the average spatiotemporal region and so hope for enough additional material to bring the average badness of the cosmos to a more acceptable level. Still other forms of Pessimism are of course conceivable, with some creative thinking.

But we are, I hope, Optimists. Some Optimists might hold that the observable portion of the universe is infinitely good. If so, they might conclude that a larger cosmos would not be better unless they’re ready to weigh the infinitudes differently. More moderately and plausibly, the observable portion of the universe might be only finitely good. Call this view Muted Optimism.

Here’s one argument for Muted Optimism. Suppose you agree that if a human life involves too much suffering, it is typically not worth living. By analogy, it seems plausible that if the observable portion of the universe contained too much suffering, it would be better if it didn’t exist. We needn’t be hedonists to accept this idea. Contra hedonism, flourishing life might be overall good despite containing more suffering than pleasure. It just might not be so good that there isn’t some amount of suffering that would make the combined package worse than nothing. But if flourishing were infinitely good, then no amount of suffering could outweigh it (though infinite suffering might create a ∞ + -∞ situation). Therefore, large finite regions are good but not infinitely good.

Muted Optimism suggests that an infinite cosmos would be better than the Small Cosmos. It seems, after all, that more goodness is better than less goodness, and infinite goodness seems best. As with Pessimism, however, the axiology needn’t be quite so simple. For example, one might hold that too much of a good thing is bad. Or one might suspect that the observable portion of the universe is much better than could reasonably be expected from a typical region and that adding more regions would objectionably dilute average goodness. Or one might simply think it would be stupendously awesome if the cosmos were some particular finite size – shaped like a giant jelly donut, perhaps, with red galaxies in the middle and lots of organic sugars along the edges.

Or one might mount the Repetition Objection, to which I will now turn.

Repetition and Value in an Infinite Cosmos

Consider a particular version of the Erasure Cosmology. There’s a Big Bang, things exist for a while, and then there’s a Big Crunch. Suppose that what happens next is an exact repetition of the first Bang-existence-Crunch. You, or rather a duplicate of you, lives exactly the same life, having exactly the same experiences, seeing exactly the same moonlight between the trees and having exactly the same thoughts about that moonlight, as envisioned by Nietzsche, all over again. And then it happens again and again, infinitely often. Call this Repetitive Erasure.

Now contrast this picture with the same cosmos, except that after the Crunch nothing exists. Call this cosmos Once and Done. Finally, contrast these two possibilities with a third, in which there is exactly one repetition: Twice and Done. (If you’re inclined toward metaphysical quibbles about the identity of indiscernibles, let’s imagine that each Bang and Crunch has some unique tag.) How might we compare the values of Once and Done, Twice and Done, and Repetitive Erasure? Four simple possibilities include:

Equal Value. Once and Done, Twice and Done, and Repetitive Erasure are all equally good. There’s no point in repeating the same events more than once. But neither is anything lost by repetition.

Linear Value. If Once and Done has value x, then Twice and Done has value 2x, and Repetitive Erasure has infinite value. The value of one run-through is not diminished by the existence of another earlier or later run-through, and the values sum.

Diminishing Returns. If Once and Done has value x, then Twice and Done has a value greater than x but less than 2x. Repetitive Erasure might have either finite or infinite value, depending on whether the returns converge toward a limit. A second run-through is good, but two run-throughs are not twice as good as a single run-through: Although it’s not the case that there’s no point in God’s hitting the replay button, so to speak, there’s less value in running things twice.

Loss of Value. If Once and Done has value x, then Twice and Done has a value less than x, and Repetitive Erasure is worse, perhaps even infinitely bad.

If Equal Value or Loss of Value is true, then Muted Optimism shouldn’t lead to preference for the infinitude of Repetitive Erasure over the finitude of Once and Done. If we further assume that in an infinite cosmos, the repetition (within some error tolerance) of any finite region is inevitable, then the argument appears to generalize. This is the Repetition Objection. Some positively-valenced existence is good, but after a point, more of the same is not better (e.g., Bramble 2016).

In ordinary cases, uniqueness or rarity can add to a thing’s value. One copy of the Mona Lisa is extremely valuable. If there were two Mona Lisas, presumably each would be less valuable, and if there were a billion Mona Lisas no one of them would presumably be worth much at all. The question is whether this holds at a cosmic scale. Might this only be market thinking, reflecting our habit of valuing things in terms of how much we would pay in conditions of scarcity? Or is there in fact something truly precious in uniqueness? (For discussion, see Lemos 2010; Chappell 2011; Bradford forthcoming.)

Perhaps there is something beautiful, or right, or fitting, in things happening only once, in a finite universe, and then ceasing. Is it good that you are the only version of you who will ever exist, so to speak – that after you have lived and died there will never again be anyone quite like you? Is it good that the cosmos contains only a single Confucius and only a single Great Barrier Reef, no duplicates of which will ever exist? Things will burn out, never to return. There’s a romantic pull to this idea. Against The Repetition Objection to the simple Muted Optimist’s preference for an infinite universe, I offer the Goldfish Argument (see also Schwitzgebel 2019, ch. 44).

According to popular belief (not in fact true), goldfish have a memory of only thirty seconds. Imagine, then, a goldfish swimming clockwise around a ring-shaped pool, completing each circuit in two minutes. Every two minutes it encounters the same reeds, the same stones, and the same counterclockwise-swimming goldfish it saw in the same place two minutes before, and each time it experiences all of these as new. The goldfish is happy with its existence: “Howdy, stranger, what a pleasure to meet you!” it says to the counterclockwise-swimming fish it meets afresh every minute. To tighten the analogy with the Repetitive Erasure cosmology, let’s stipulate that each time around this goldfish sees and does and thinks and experiences exactly the same things.

Now stop the goldfish mid-swim and explain the situation. The goldfish will not say, “oh, I guess there’s no point in my going around again.” The goldfish will want to continue its happy little existence, and rightly so. It still wants to see and enjoy what’s around the next bend. Moment to moment it is having good experiences. You harm and disappoint the goldfish by stopping its experiences, as long as each experience is, locally, good – even if they have all happened before innumerably many times. This is true whether we catch the goldfish after its first swim around, after its second, or after its googolplex-to-the-googolplexth. It's better to let the fish swim on. If the analogy holds at cosmic scales, then Equal Value and Loss of Value must be false. Maybe, though, there’s still something attractive about uniqueness, some truth in it that isn’t simply inappropriate market-style thinking? I see no need to deny that there really is something special about the first time. Let’s grant that it’s possible that the first go-round is somehow made less valuable by later go-rounds. As long as the harm done by stopping the goldfish (by denying future goods) exceeds the harm done by letting the goldfish continue (by reducing the rarity of past goods), then Diminishing Returns is the correct view. If we further assume that the added value does not continually shrink in a way that approaches zero, then the view we should embrace is one on which Repetitive Erasure would have infinite value.

This thinking appears to extend to the Infinitary Cosmology. Duplicates of you, and me, and all Earth, and the whole Milky Way will repeat over and over, infinitely. Each repetition adds some positive value to the cosmos, and in sum the value is infinite.

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Related:

Goldfish-Pool Immortality (May 30, 2014)

Duplicating the Universe (Apr 29, 2015)

Everything Is Valuable (May 6, 2022)

How Not to Calculate Utilities in an Infinite Universe (Feb 10, 2023)

Repetition and Value in an Infinite Universe (forthcoming), in S. Hetherington, ed., Extreme Philosophy. Routledge. [image adapted from Midjourney]

New Voices in Philosophy

guest post by Nick Riggle

Philosophy is a famously rigid and complex discipline full of daunting and difficult prose. As a sign of this, people have wondered whether philosophy is literature. Literature is creatively ambitious, figurative and fun, wildly imaginative and associative. Philosophy, in contrast, is often hyperbolically literal, formulaic, painstakingly logical, tortuous and so often unfun.

But even in a tradition as strict as analytic philosophy, fun can be had, imaginations can run wild, and style can reign. If there is anything true in the complaint that philosophy lacks the quality of literature, it is that philosophy often lacks voice.

What does it mean for a “voice” to be present in works of philosophy? Voice is a vague concept in literary theory and it is often defined in a way that is indistinguishable from the typical definition of literary style. Here is how an expert defines voice: “A writer’s voice is the way his or her personality comes through on the page, via everything from word choice and sentence structure to tone and punctuation.” And here is philosopher Jenefer Robinson’s influential definition of literary style: “I shall argue that style is essentially a way of doing something and that it is expressive of personality. …what count as the verbal elements of style are precisely those elements which contribute to the expression of personality.” If you’d rather not take a philosopher’s word for it, here is poet Frank O’Hara: “Style at its highest ebb is personality.”

But voice and style are not the same. Literary style is the expression of the ideals the writer has for their writing. The writer who values economy of expression and rhythm has a different literary style from the writer who values complexity of thought and detailed emotional insight. Writing that follows strict formulae or rules of composition (e.g. writing legal contracts or instruction manuals) has difficulty achieving style because the rules crowd out the expression of literary values. Trying to inject one of these anti-style genres with style is a recipe for literary disaster. Or worse: witness WeWork’s failed IPO filing.

Voice comes from the perspective the writer inhabits as a writer. A writer’s voice is that of a single mother in Southern California expressing the difficulties of raising two children. She might do this through a poetic economy of expression or through a complex and emotionally nuanced account. A writer’s voice is that of a Zoomer navigating romance through DMs and dating apps, or a bank executive worried about the economy. Literary voice is, in this way, personal, where literary style is artistic.

Of course voice and style are not entirely separate. They can interact and influence each other. A writer’s artistic ideals might be informed by the perspective that drives their voice, and a writer’s voice can be shaped and inflected by their style. Some aesthetic writing practices encourage the former (rap, or romantic poetry with its ‘spontaneous overflow of passionate feelings’) and others tend toward the latter (Flaubert, Proust, Ernaux, French Writing in General?).

But there is an important difference between voice and style when comes to connecting with a reader. While style can captivate and impress, voice is a locus of love. By conveying the specificity of a perspective, literary voice forges connections and grounds affection between reader and writer, where people can communicate elusive truths about the world and their experiences. In doing so, voice has the power to create literary intimacy.

Although style and voice can interact in mutually supportive ways, when it comes to philosophy, style and voice tend to conflict. Philosophers are encouraged to adopt an ideal of philosophical writing that inhabits an impartial or impersonal perspective. Philosophers abstract from all real-world roles and particular perspectives and write from the place that Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere”—speaking from a general ‘we’, making claims about what ‘one’ does, structuring the prose by the general strictures of logic, writing to a faceless opponent.

If literary voice comes from inhabiting in writing a particular role and perspective, then a common ideal of philosophical writing amounts to aspiring to a kind of voicelessness, where everyone tries to write (and read) from the placeless perspective of a General Philosopher. Philosophy thus tends to lack that source of writer-reader connection and affection, and so it often overlooks those elusive truths we can communicate by developing literary intimacy.

The ideal of voiceless writing is a kind of style, and since style and voice interact, the philosophical ideal of writing can be quite literally self-sabotaging—trying to bring a voiceless self forward in writing in ways that clearly present a vocal self. Often that voice is simply a product of its time—the way that Kant, for example, comes across as a very specific dude in a very specific set of circumstances—revealed in various time-stamped expressive devices, e.g. the strategies the philosopher deploys to attain voicelessness.

When we suppress the power of voice in philosophical writing, we tilt philosophy toward voiceless questions that ask for perspective-free answers, and in doing so we encourage philosophers to lose their voices. This is an expressive problem in itself, but the problem is exacerbated when we also care about making philosophy a more diverse practice. Simply gaining membership to an elite club does not mean you can really speak your mind. And a philosopher’s particular identity can deeply influence their philosophical concerns without shifting their writing voice an inch out of the view from nowhere. Without diversifying voice in philosophical writing, we risk losing a source of the intimacy that can communicate the important and elusive truths philosophers possess. To bring voice into philosophy, we need to be able to step out of the view from nowhere and land somewhere, in our own bodies, times, and lives.

History has shown that philosophy can inhabit a wide range of literary forms in the service of voice—novels, letters, memoirs, dialogues, confessions, plays, and poetry [as I was editing this piece Helen De Cruz posted this]—and past philosophers have effectively developed voice in their works. Unfortunately, perhaps the most famous and widely taught example is Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, where, to me at least, he at best semi-convincingly deploys the voice of a man desperate for knowledge to encourage the reader to cultivate their own doubt. There are more effective examples in Montaigne, Emerson, de Beauvoir, Arendt, Cavell, and others. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes from the perspective of two radically different worldviews to get his readers to inhabit them and appreciate their differences. Sor Juana’s The Answer and Friedrich Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre scream with voice.

Some contemporary philosophers have tiptoed outside of the confines of academic writing. Most recently, Kieran Setiya’s Life is Hard adopts the voice of a man who suffers chronic pain and of a philosopher who wants to understand the place of pain in a life well lived. Chloe Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty combines a philosopher’s discernment with deeply personal, beautiful, and humorous insights into her own disability. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s impassioned voice in Elite Capture is blazing with his own sense of care and conviction. My recent book This Beauty develops the voice of a man who had a challenging childhood, who is becoming a father, and who sincerely wants to understand what, if anything, makes life worth living so that he has something sincere and thoughtful to say to his sons. Philosophers like John Kaag, Anthony Appiah, Agnes Callard, and Alexander Nehamas prove that philosophers can write from places of pain, oppression, loss, joy, need, and love. And in doing so they show how philosophy can handle deep and difficult issues in ways that bring to the fore the humanity they have forged by living and confronting life in the actual world as unusually reflective and intelligent people.

Let’s unleash the literary power of philosophy and let our voices sing.

[image source]

"There Are No Chairs" Says the Illusionist, Sitting in One

Recent "illusionists", such as Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer, deny that consciousness exists.  If that sounds so obviously false that you suspect they must mean something peculiar by "consciousness", you're right!  But they say they don't mean anything peculiar by "consciousness" -- that they're just using it in the ordinary sense, or -- rather differently -- at least the sense that most 21st century philosophers mean when they use the word "consciousness".

Frankish and I have been back and forth about this quite a bit.  For a few years, I seem to have had him convinced that there's a sense of "consciousness" that is relatively neutral among philosophical theories, which he shouldn't deny the existence of.  But recently he appears to have changed his mind about this, and this past weekend, he posted a fictional dialogue illustrating his continuing disagreement.

To illustrate how illusionists tend to come across to those of us who aren't illusionists, I've constructed this fictional dialogue with an illusionist about chairs.

Eric and the Illusionist have scheduled a meeting in a large, bustling cafe with a diversity of tables, chairs, and benches, each unique.  There are big puffy armchairs, three-legged stools, hardback wooden chairs, bean bags, arty chairs that are made of single swooping pieces of wood, rolling desk chairs on posts that branch out to five wheels, and so on.  Eric is seated in a brown recliner.  The illusionist arrives.

Illusionist [sitting in a Victorian-era armchair]: As I've said many times, Eric, there are no chairs!

Eric: It seems to me that you are sitting in one.

Illusionist: Oh, this thing?  Of course it's not a chair.

Eric: Could you remind me why you think not?

Illusionist: Well, the concept of a chair, as you know, is the concept of a solid object of a certain sort.  And as current physics tells us, the world is mostly empty space.  This thing is not solid!  Therefore, it's not a chair.

Eric: I'm not so sure that's the best interpretation of particle physics, but maybe.  Let's grant that it is.  I don't think that it follows that there are no chairs.  It's not essential to the concept of a chair that it be a "solid object" in the sense you mean.

Illusionist: Well, let's ask some ordinary people.  [Turns toward Cafe Patron 1]  Excuse me, Miss, do you think that a chair is a solid object?

Cafe Patron 1: Yes, of course!

Illusionist [to Eric]: See!

Eric: Look, whatever folk theory ordinary people may or may not have about chairs is not relevant to the point.  Clearly, there are chairs.

Illusionist: Well, philosophical theories also lead us astray.  Over there I see my friend, the Solid Object Theorist.  Let's ask him!

[Illusionist and Eric walk over to Solid Object Theorist]

Illusionist: Hey, SOT, good to see you here!  Do chairs exist?

Solid Object Theorist: Yes, of course!  I'm sitting in one now.

Illusionist: And what are they essentially?

Solid Object Theorist: They are essentially solid objects of a certain sort.  They contain little to no empty space.

Illusionist [to Eric]: See?

Eric: I'm not sure we should accept that philosophical theory about chairs.

Illusionist: But don't you see, both the ordinary person and my favorite philosophical theorist agree that chairs are solid objects, so that must be the concept in play.  So if there there are no solid objects -- as my favorite version of particle physics implies -- there are no chairs.

Solid Object Theorist: The Illusionist and I agree: If there are no solid objects, there are no chairs.  What could be more commonsensical?  The Illusionist accepts the antecedent and so accepts the consequent.  I deny the consequent and so deny the antecedent.  But we agree on the conditional.

Eric: Look, I don't think it's useful to define "chair" in such a theory-laden way.

Illusionist: Well, what do you think a chair is?

Eric: I don't have a positive theory of chairs.  They don't have a single common shape.  Most are made for sitting in, but not all.  And things can be made for sitting in that aren't chairs, so there's no simple functional definition either.

Illusionist: So you have no theory of chairs, and you deny the folk theory, and you deny the Solid Object Theorist's theory, and yet you say there are chairs?  What kind of defense of the existence of chairs is that?

Eric: Look, I think we can define "chair" by example.  Look at that thing, and that thing, and that thing [pointing at various, diverse types of chairs].  They're all chairs.  And that, and that, and that, are not [pointing at a stool, a sofa, and a table, respectively].  Can't we just use the term "chair" to capture whatever it is that the things I've just called "chairs" have in common, which the other things which aren't chairs lack?  I don't think we need to commit to some disputable theory of it.  Look, ordinary people can sort chairs from non-chairs in a consensus way (perhaps with some disputable or in-between cases).  [Turns toward Cafe Patron 2]  Sir, I noticed that you've been attending to my conversation with Illusionist.  So you've seen my examples of chairs and non-chairs.  See that cafe worker coming in with two new objects?  What would you say, is one or both of them chairs?

Cafe Patron 2: That first object [a cheap plastic deck chair] is a chair.  That second object [a yoga mat] is not.

Illusionist: But, sir, wouldn't you agree that chairs are solid objects?

Cafe Patron 2: Yes, of course!

Illusionist: See, Eric, there are no chairs.

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Related:

Phenomenal Consciousness, Defined and Defended as Innocently as I Can Manage (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2016)

Inflate and Explode (Sep 6, 2018)

[image: Dall-E 2: lots of chairs, bean bag, lawn chair, rolling desk chair, sofa, hardback chair, soft armchair, occupied by people sipping coffee and chatting]

Power Clashing and the Structure of Practices

guest post by Nick Riggle

Some things just go together. Medjool dates and salted cashews. Hot pink and cyan. Unagi and oloroso. Sunshine and grass. Put these together and please enjoy your happiness. Other things not so much: manspreading and crowded subways, espresso and cottage cheese...

Zebra stripes and plaid?

Fashion is an aesthetic practice full of rules and restrictions: navy and brown yes, but no navy and black. No socks with sandals. No denim on denim (boooo). The long history of fashion provides a background of formalities and traditions whose dictates guide us in often unseen ways.

What, if anything, justifies these rules? In poetry, rules tend to serve other values, e.g. the value of complex and powerful prose. The strict rules of a pantoum key us into subtle changes in the meaning of a repeated and repurposed line, amplifying the power of the line and of the poem and poet in turn. The basic rules of pop song construction (~3 minutes, 4/4 time, no key changes, intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure) provide a kind of sonic public playground, an accessible template for fun and endless variation.

In the case of mixed patterns the justification seems simple: mixed patterns clash. You don’t mix zebra stripes and plaid because you don’t mix visually conflicting prints and patterns, perhaps especially when one is a South African animal print and the other is Scottish tartan. They do not look good together. It seems that the rule couldn’t be easier to justify, since fashion is a practice that cares about aesthetic value. Mixed patterns are visually confusing and displeasing. Fashion is about looking good. No mixed patterns. QED.

That might seem easy, simple, and true. But it is a wildly superficial account of the practice.

[image source]

*

Aesthetic practices are full of rules that cannot be justified by such simple appeals to aesthetic value. A recent paper by Guy Rohrbaugh discusses the example of  Western classical music performance, where score compliance is strictly necessary. The rule, play all and only the notes of the score, is so forceful that it does not matter if playing a different note would have greater aesthetic value. Playing other notes might sound better, be performatively expressive, or shock the audience—none of that matters because one must play all the notes. Why is there such a rule? And why is it so forceful?

Drawing on work by Aron Edidin, Rohrbaugh argues that there are indirect aesthetic reasons for the rule. First, some works have a complexity of thematic repetition, inversion, and sonic play that cannot be realized improvisationally—for their value to be realized they have to be written down and played as written. (This of course is not to say that improvisational works cannot be extremely complex.) Second, writing the music down and playing it as written allows for repetition and dissemination—more people can hear it, and everyone can hear it again. Third, this allows people to develop and deepen their understanding and appreciation of the work. And fourth, performers can bring this understanding and appreciation to bear on their performances in ways that realize different expressive, performative, and appreciative values.

The rule cannot be justified by individual-level evaluative considerations, but it can be justified at the wider practice level. The rule helps realize the goods of collective aesthetic life—sharing complex aesthetic value, deepening our understanding and appreciation of it, and expressing that understanding in our performances, experiences, and interpretations of the work. And since these goods structure aesthetic practices in general, our individual aesthetic actions must bend to them.

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There is a kind of uber-value in fashion that mirrors this, generating various individual-level rules. Fashion is an art of self-expression. As such, anything goes, as long as it works, and what works is what captures something about who one is in a way that communicates with one’s audience. In this way, fashion goes hand-in-hand with style, where style is the expression of ideals. But expressing yourself and having style through clothing are not easy. So it helps to have more and less stringent rules addressed to individuals who, by following them, can’t go too far astray—guardrails that keep people on track and the group more or less together.

To use an entirely random example, it might befit a philosophy professor to wear cargo pants, t-shirt, and unbuttoned button-down shirt every day. The rules approve. The professor can make some limited choices within that general look – a colorful or a black tee, maybe with some philosophy reference on it, or a plaid overshirt that’s a bit ‘90s Seattle/lumberjack. The look conveys a lot; people have an easy time putting the professor in the right social group, noting a thing or two about their sensibility. The professor can rest assured that they don’t look too bad, but expression trumps looks: it matters that this look is self-expressive—a beautiful and expensive Italian suit would look great but it wouldn’t work.

To see this even more clearly, enter the power clasher—my favorite example of expression trumping looks in fashion. Power clashing has been around for some time, long enough, at least, for future Jack Donaghy (“Alterna-Jack”) to brag about his mastery of it. Power clashing is about clashing boldly—wearing animal prints with tartan and throwing naval stripes in there for good measure. Clashing patterns are primally visually confusing—hence the rule against—but visual confusion can ground expressive power and expressive power always wins. The power clasher says Yeah, I’m shining a flashlight in your eyes—what are you gonna do about it? The hope of fashion is that you shine back in your own way.

The individual-level rules of fashion are not ultimately justified by appeal to visual appeal. They typically help us look good, true, but more importantly they help us meet minimal conditions of self-expression. Power clashers prove that an apparently ruly practice can be deeply unruly at its heart, because the practice’s heart is the powerful and elusive value of self-expression through dress. We should think of the rules of fashion not as strict rules—ones that obviously change all the time anyway—but as communal notes on how to realize the practice’s governing value.

*

This makes me wonder about philosophy, which is full of stringent norms and standards, and full of people ready to enforce them—implicit and explicit norms of logic, form, voice, argument, address, and interaction. There are so many that our vigilance in observance of them threatens to make our essays and books oppressive to write and exhausting to read, as if we always had to wear formal dress lest we be regarded as unserious at best, dumb at worst. Is it too easy to forget that philosophy can be done without adhering to such norms? Like poetry, the beauty of philosophy can shine through and because of its rules, but poetry has embraced its ‘free verse’. I sometimes wonder if we collectively lost our sense of philosophy’s potential for literary creativity.

The sad truth is that philosophers can be extremely dismissive of those who fall out of line with philosophy’s conservative standards of writing, painting Wittgenstein as a charlatan, Nietzsche as a madman, the novels of Iris Murdoch as irrelevant, the dialogue as a lost genre, or anything outside of the standard form professional publication as lesser. I don’t know whether we can literally power clash in philosophy but I wouldn’t mind a few more flashlights in my face.

The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

According to consequentialism, we should act to maximize good consequences. According to longtermism, we should act to benefit the long-term future. If either is correct, then it would be morally good to destroy Earth to seed a new, life-supporting universe.

Hypothetically, it might someday become possible to generate whole new universes. Some cosmological theories, for example, hypothesize that black holes seed new universes -- universes causally disconnected from our own universe, each with its own era of Big-Bang-like inflation, resulting in vastly many new galaxies. Maybe our own universe is itself the product of a black hole in a prior universe. If we artificially generate a black hole of the right sort, we might create a whole new universe.

Now let's further suppose that black holes are catastrophically expensive or dangerous: The only way to generate a new black-hole-seeded universe requires sacrificing Earth. Maybe to do it, we need to crash Earth into something else, or maybe the black hole needs to be sufficiently large that it swallows us up rather than harmlessly dissipating.

So there you are, facing a choice: Flip a switch and you create a black hole that destroys Earth and births a whole new universe, or don't flip the switch and let things continue as they are.

Let's make it more concrete: You are one of the world's leading high-energy physicists. You are in charge of a very expensive project that will be shut down tomorrow and likely never repeated. You know that if tonight you launch a certain process, it will irreversibly create a universe-generating black hole that will quickly destroy Earth. The new universe will be at least the size of our own universe, with at least as many galaxies abiding by the same general laws of physics. If you don't launch the process tonight, it's likely that no one in the future ever will. A project with this potential may never be approved again before the extinction of humanity, or if it is, it will likely have safety protocols that prevent black holes.

[Image: Midjourney rendition of a new cosmos exploding out of the back of a black hole]

If you flip the switch, you kill yourself and everyone you know. You break every promise you ever made. You destroy not only all of humanity but every plant and animal on Earth, as well as the planet itself. You destroy the potential of any future biological species or AI that might replace or improve upon us. You become by far the worst mass murderer and genocidaire that history has ever known. But... a whole universe worth of intelligent life will exist that will not exist if you don't flip the switch.

Do you flip the switch?

From a simple consequentialist or longtermist perspective, the answer seems obvious. Flip the switch! Assume you estimate that the future value of all life on, or deriving from, Earth is X. Under even conservative projections about the prevalence of intelligent life in galaxies following laws like our own, the value of a new universe should be at least a billion times X. If we're thinking truly long term, launching the new universe seems to be by far the best choice.

Arguably, even if you think there's only a one in a million chance that a new universe will form, you ought to flip that switch. After all, here's the expected value calculation:

• Flip switch: 0  + 0.000001*1,000,000,000X = 1000X.
• Don't flip switch: X + 0 = X.

(In each equation, the first term reflects the expected value of Earth's future given the decision and the second term reflects the expected value generated or not generated in the seeded universe.)

Almost certainly, you would simply destroy the whole planet, with no compensating good consequences. But if there's a one in a million chance that by doing so you'd create a whole new universe of massive value, the thinking goes, it's worth it!

Now I'm inclined to think that it wouldn't be morally good to completely destroy Earth to launch a new universe, and I'm even more strongly inclined to think it wouldn't be morally good to completely destroy Earth for a mere one in a million chance of launching a new universe. I suspect many (not all) of you will share these inclinations.

If so, then either the consequentialist and longtermist thinking displayed here must be mistaken, or the consequentialist or longtermist has some means of wiggling out of the black hole conclusion. Call this the Black Hole Objection.

Could the consequentialist or longtermist wiggle out by appealing to some sort of discounting of future or spatiotemporally disconnected people? Maybe. But there would have to be a lot of discounting to shift the balance of considerations, and it's in the spirit of standard consequentialism and longtermism that we shouldn't discount distant people and the future too much. Still, a non-longtermist, highly discounting consequentialist might legitimately go this route.

Could the consequentialist or longtermist wiggle out by appealing to deontological norms -- that is ethical rules that would be violated by flipping the switch? For example, maybe you promised not to flip the switch. Also, murder is morally forbidden -- especially mass murder, genocide, and the literal destruction of the entire planet. But the core idea of consequentialism is that what justifies such norms is only their consequences. Lying and murder are generally bad because they lead to bad consequences, and when the overall consequences tilt the other direction, one should lie (e.g., to save a friend's life) or murder (e.g., to stop Hitler). So it doesn't seem like the consequentialist can wiggle out in this way. A longtermist needn't be a consequentialist, but almost everyone agrees that consequences matter substantially. If the longtermist is committed to the equal weighting of long-term and short-term goods, this seems to be a case where the long-term goods would massively outweigh the short-term goods.

Could the consequentialist or longtermist wiggle out by appealing to the principle that we owe more to existing people than to future people? As Jan Narveson puts it, "We are in favor of making people happy, but neutral about making happy people" (1973, p. 80). Again, any strong application of this principle seems contrary to the general spirit of consequentialism and longtermism. The longtermist, especially, cares very much about ensuring that the future is full of happy people.

Could they wiggle out by suggesting that intelligent entities, on average, have zero or negative value, so that creating more of them is neutral or even bad? For example, maybe the normal state of things is that negative experiences outweigh positive ones, and most creatures have miserable lives not worth living. This is either a dark view on which we would be better off not have been born or a view on which somehow humanity luckily has positive value despite the miserable condition of space aliens. The first option seems too dark (though check out Schopenhauer) and the second unjustified.

Could they wiggle out by appealing to infinite expectations? Maybe our actions now have infinite long-term expected value, through their unending echoes through the future universe, so that adding a new positive source of value is as pointless as trying to sum two infinitudes into a larger infinitude. (Infinitudes come in different cardinalities, but one generally doesn't get larger infinitudes by summing two of them.) As I've argued in an earlier post, this is more of a problem for longtermism and consequentialism than a promising solution.

Could they wiggle out by appealing to risk aversion -- that is, the principle of preferring outcomes with low uncertainty? Maybe, but the principle is contentious and difficult to apply. Too strict an application of it is probably inconsistent with longtermist thinking. The long-term future is highly uncertain, and thus risk aversion seemingly justifies its sacrifice for more certain short-term goods. (As with discounting, this escape might be more available to a consequentialist than a longtermist.)

Could they wiggle out by assuming a great future for humanity? Maybe it's possible that humanity populates the universe far beyond Earth. This substantially increases the value of X. Let's generously assume that if we populate the universe far beyond Earth, the value of our descendants' lives is equal to the value of the whole universe you could create tonight by generating a black hole. Even so, given that there's substantial uncertainty that humanity will have so great a future, you should still flip the switch. Suppose you think there's a 10% chance. The expectations then become .1*X (don't flip the switch) vs. X (flip the switch). Only if you think it more likely that humanity has that great future than that the black hole generates some other species of set of species whose value is comparable to that hypothetical future, would it make sense to refrain from flipping the switch.

If we add the thought that our descendants might generate black holes, which generate new universes which generate new black holes, which generate new universes which generate new black holes, and so on, then we're back into the infinite expectations problem.

Philosophers are creative! I'm sure there are other ways the consequentialist or longtermist could try to wiggle out of the Black Hole Objection. But my inclination is to think the most natural move is for them simply to "bite the bullet": Admit that it would be morally good to destroy Earth to seed a new cosmic inflation, then tolerate the skeptical looks from those of us who would prefer you not to be so ready (hypothetically!) to kill us in an attempt to create something better.

Sexiness and Love Island

guest post by Nick Riggle

Sexiness can seem straightforward. Everyone knows what it’s like to want and respond to it—in oneself, in others—and I’d venture that most people do indeed want it one way or another. But the ease of feeling might flow in the other direction. Rod Stewart reminds us that sexiness more than flirts with objectification: If you want my body and you think I’m sexy… The desire for sexiness seems to include the desire for bodies as such, and so its aesthetic value seems to flirt too directly with ethical disvalue. It is difficult to know how to feel: aesthetically attracted, ethically repulsed.

* 

One response to the sexiness problem is what I call the Prince Strategy. In his song “Sexy M.F.” Prince solves the problem by transforming sexiness from sexual to mental attractiveness.

We need to talk about things, tell me what cha do
Tell me whatcha eat, I might cook for you
See it really don't matter 'cause it's all about me and you
Ain't no one else around
I'm movin' with the blindfold, gagged and bound
I don't mind, see this ain't about sex
It's all about love being in charge of this life and the next
Why all the cosmic talk?
I just want you smarter than I'll ever be
When we take that walk

…

You seem perplexed I haven't taken you yet
Can't you see I'm harder than a man can get
I got wet dreams comin' out of my ears
I get hard if the wind blows your cologne near me
But I can take it, 'cause I want the whole nine
This ain't about the body, it's about the mind

Prince emphasizes that true sexiness is ‘about the mind’. This conceptual engineering gives him the best of both worlds. As he sings later in the song, “I'm happy to change my state of mind for this behind.”

[Midjourney rendition of Prince cooking eggs for a sexy woman]

As many philosophers have pointed out, sexiness is bound up with patriarchy and its attendant restrictions on women’s autonomy. The Prince Strategy tries to sidestep the connections between sexiness, women’s bodies, and patriarchy by replacing sexual, bodily attractiveness with mental attractiveness. This is an appealing strategy, for under patriarchy it is not enough to agree with Martha Nussbaum’s point that objectification means many things (7 by her count) and it is not always ethically wrong. Under patriarchy it often is, and that’s one reason why the Prince Strategy can seem attractive in this extremely nonideal world.

The problem with the Prince Strategy is not that minds cannot be sexy—obviously they can, says this philosopher—it’s that it seems to deny that bodies can also be sexy. Having watched more than a few seasons of Love Island UK I can report: obviously they can. Should we simply ignore that fact? I should clarify that watching Love Island UK is not my only evidence.

*

Sheila Lintott and Sherri Irvin develop another response by intervening in the patriarchal culture of sexiness that encourages women to embrace a notion of sexiness that conforms to the male gaze. On their view, we should retain the link between sexiness and sexual desire but revise the concept of sexiness to construct one that is respectful of all persons: “To find a person sexy in this sense is to see their body as infused with an expression of self and animated by their own sexual identity. … Respecting sexiness involves seeing others not (only) as sex objects but necessarily as sexual subjects: human beings who are in charge of their sexual agency.” (p. 305)

Call this the Embodiment strategy: sexiness is the attractiveness of a person’s embodied sexuality. A sexy person expresses their sexuality in their look, demeanor, composure. To find someone sexy is to be attracted to their embodied sexuality.

*

Now consider: the Love Island Phenomenon. If you’ve watched as much Love Island UK as I have, then you have witnessed the following phenomenon many times over: You meet someone and find them very sexy. But over time you come know more about them: their personality, their values and goals (or lack thereof), their interests and style. And, like magic, their sexiness disappears.

Nothing need change about how they embody their sexuality, so what could explain the change in sexiness? And while the Embodiment strategy seems unable to capture the change, the Prince strategy can’t capture the initial attraction, for initially we know almost nothing about their minds and quite a lot about their bodies.

It seems that Love Island UK spells trouble for all.[1]

One response that Lintott and Irvin might offer is to say that the Love Island Phenomenon is best described not as a change in sexiness but as a change in attractiveness. What changes is not the person’s sexiness but your being attracted to it. Their sexiness is neutralized by your awareness of their unattractive traits. But this response makes me wonder why, if sexiness is embodied sexuality, information about the person’s non-sexual character should change how I feel about their sexiness.

*

Here is another proposal, call it Prince’s Synthesizer: Maybe the sexy truth lies in a synthesis of the Prince and Embodiment strategies: sexiness is more than embodied sexuality—it is embodied mind, where the features of mind that matter are any features we might find hot. Humans are extremely creative in finding hotness. Some of these features can shine as and through embodied sexuality: the embodiment of confidence, quirkiness, sexual poise, self-possession, boldness, and so on. But others shine in other ways: a person’s sexy intelligence, sincerity, drive, resilience, grit, creativity, worldliness, or…the way they eat falafel, or curl their lip, or smell a certain way.

Prince’s Synthesizer makes better sense of the idea that when (or at least often when) we find someone sexy, we are attracted to their style, or the way they embody their personal ideals—the way their dreams and aspirations manifest in their ways of living. Sexual aspiration generates style as much as intellectual or athletic aspiration. Eros wends its way through each. We might catch a glimpse of a person’s style in getting a sense of their sexuality, but that is only part of a bigger stylistic picture, which, when it comes into full view, along with the minds that bodies embody, might reveal something…not hot. Love Island UK Season 9 now streaming!

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

[1] Big thanks to the students in my Fall 2022 Aesthetics and Ethics class for a great discussion about this.

Wearing Band T-Shirts of Bands You Don’t Know

guest post by Nick Riggle

A recent trend has teens and twenty somethings wearing band t-shirts of bands they don’t know. You can know that they don’t know the band because you can ask them: Are you a fan of AC/DC, Nirvana, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, The Doors, Slayer, Led Zeppelin? They will respond with breathtaking nonchalance: Huh? Oh, this shirt?

They wear it for the look.

Could the look be flattering? For Millennials, and most certainly for Gen-X, there might be no clearer example of a negative volitional necessity that generates the unthinkable. Thou shalt not wear a band t-shirt if thou knowest not the band. No thought is so bold, so unafraid of rejection, as to cross the Millennial and Gen-X mind.

But to them it’s edgy. It’s street. It’s rock n roll. It’s Kendall Jenner.

*

Who knows where it started (perhaps Ghesquière for Balenciaga in 2012), but everyone knows that Jenner slays. Long an influencer in the glammed-up band t-shirt game (along with her sisters), Jenner has been spotted wearing, among others, Metallica, Kiss, AC/DC, ZZ Top, and Led Zeppelin shirts, but when it comes to concerts she favors Harry Styles, Taylor Swift, and Fleetwood Mac. Philosophers have wondered whether you should be consistent in your personal aesthetics. Jenner seems unconcerned. When the metal band Slayer’s guitarist Gary Holt wore a t-shirt that read “Kill the Kardashians” on the band’s farewell tour in 2019, Jenner responded with classic Kardashian shade. She rocked a Slayer shirt that said “RIP” and (probably) helped bump the legacy band’s merch sales up to 10 million dollars that year.

*

Is it wrong to wear band t-shirts of bands you don’t know? In one sense it is obviously a mistake. I find it useful here to think about the groundbreaking theory of aesthetic value that Dominic McIver Lopes develops in his 2018 book Being for Beauty. Lopes argues that aesthetic value is metaphysically tied to the rules and norms of specific aesthetic practices. Your aesthetic reasons for acting one way rather than another when it comes to e.g. pulling an espresso shot are tied to the specific norms and achievements of the practice of pulling espresso. In the practice of band fandom that produces and distributes band t-shirts, one of the rules is crystal clear: wear a band shirt only if you love the band. If you wear one without knowing the band, then you’re not very good at the practice. You are not responding to the reasons the practice generates.

But Lopes’s theory allows for a single non-aesthetic property (or set of such) to ground different aesthetic properties in different practices. Different practices have different ‘profiles’, mapping different movements, shapes, colors, images, and so on onto different aesthetic values. The same contours and colors that are lively in minimalism are subdued abstract expressionism; the same sequence of movements that is beautiful in tap dance is awkward in ballet; a few perfect poetry verses make for a few terrible rap verses.

Maybe Kendall Jenner (and whoever else) established a new aesthetic practice of wearing band shirts as a non-fan. Wearing the shirt will potentially have different aesthetic values in each practice. Wearing one as a fan is metal, dark, unruly. As a non-fan it is edgy, indie, street, and…Kardashianesque.

*

There are many aesthetic practices that cast the products of another aesthetic practice in a new role. In bad cases it is ignorant cultural appropriation. In good cases it is brilliant fusion or avant-garde innovation. Even with billionaire influencers involved, wearing band t-shirts of bands you don’t know seems less like Ikea selling “jerk chicken” (bad) or sushirritos (good) and more like Jim Stark, the rebel without a cause, the jobless teen wearing work boots. Some aesthetic practices are freeloaders. Some other practice imbues the band shirt, the boots, the jeans with meaning. Outsiders detect that meaning, are somehow attracted to it, they latch onto and repurpose it without contributing to the original practice. In a sense they have to repurpose it because they don’t really know what it is. But it seems cool or interesting or irresistible and so whatever they do with it is unlikely to be the aesthetically right thing according to the practice. But being moved and inspired in this way is just part of what it is to aesthetically value something—it is to want to imitate it, incorporate it into your life, make it yours and share it with others. And in a sense they are not wrong: Band t-shirts are obviously cool.

*

If wearing band t-shirts of bands you don’t know is a new aesthetic practice, then there is ignorance on each side. From the fan’s point of view, the Kendall Jenner imitators are brazenly ignorant and disrespectful, flippantly adopting a mere ‘look’ by exploiting something deeply personal. From the Jenner point of view, the fans are at best overly protective, at worst plain pretentious. It’s just a t-shirt, after all, and look how dope it looks with jeans, heels, and the right jewelry!

But these freeloader practices are sure sources of confusion and letdown. Fan shirts are a quick path to aesthetic community. As a fan, you might get excited to see the youth—or perhaps billionaire influencers—in your fan club. You give a knowing nod to the unusually cool-looking person wearing an ‘80s Megadeath shirt and they return a cold stare. You say what a proper fan might say: Endgame was surprisingly good huh? To which they respond: Oh, the shirt? I don’t really know this band, I just like how it looks.

If the aesthetic goods in the non-fan’s practice piggyback on the goods in the fan’s practice, then surely the fan is owed something: Deference? Recognition? Respect? This suggests a rule that structures aesthetic practices in general: aesthetic freeloaders should orbit and defer to their source practice; they should not spin away in an attempt to create their own orbit.

What could justify this rule? It’s not that bad to ignorantly wear band t-shirts—it just kind of sucks—so the idea that it’s morally wrong seems off. And if specific aesthetic practices are practical worlds unto themselves, then it’s not immediately obvious what resources Lopes’s theory has to make good on the wrongness. But here is a thought: the aesthetic value of band t-shirts lies in the way they promote aesthetic community. They anchor individuality, express it to others, and occasion community. The t-shirt freeloader misunderstands the aesthetic value of their clothes. Doing so is apt to produce confusion and missed connection, and so some deference to the aesthetic goods of a source practice is called for.

When the right deference, recognition, or respect is not forthcoming, one might be tempted to respond with contempt at the failure of aesthetic connection, at the disrespect for the norms of a good practice. But just beyond the confusion and let down is a social opening—an opportunity for these different individuals to bond. The failure of communication is an opportunity for enlightenment: “Well you should check out Rust in Peace. “Tornado of Souls” is my favorite song.” That might take a little extra swagger on the part of the true fan. All the more reason to do it. Boldly opening up can create a bridge between worlds, and venturing into each other’s different aesthetic worlds can both expand and refine our own.

Bridges go both ways. As it turns out, Gary Holt’s encounter with the Kardashians made him a lot more Kardashianesque. Although he wore the “Kill the Kardashians” shirt because he wanted to “kill their careers”, they seem to have rubbed off on him. He now sells a lot of those t-shirts online and has expanded his collection of merch to include a range of anti-Kardashian graphics and products. A bona fide influencer.

One of my brothers is a deep player in the niche sneaker world. Like, Pizza Hut branded Reebok Pumps deep. And he got me a pair of niche sneakers that I wear now and then. I barely understand what I own. My main relationship with the shoes is that they are by far the most comfortable pair I have ever worn. So I rock them gladly, and almost every time I do some stranger comments: Nice kicks; dope shoes; fire *whatup headnod*. I happily reap the communal benefits of a practice I don’t understand.

The older I get, the more I get used to being ignored in public. Increasingly rare is the lovely random encounter, sparked by whatever, lighting up the day. Maybe I’ll buy half a dozen random band t-shirts, wear them around town, and see who I meet.

[image source]

The Emotional Alignment Design Policy

I've been writing a lot recently about what Mara Garza and I, since 2015, have been calling the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle: Don't create AI systems of disputable moral status. Doing so, one courts the risk of either underattributing or overattributing rights to the systems, and both directions of error are likely to have serious moral costs.

(Violations of the Design Policy of the Excluded Middle are especially troubling when some well-informed experts reasonably hold that the AI systems are far below having humanlike moral standing and other well-informed experts reasonably hold that the AI systems deserve moral consideration similar to that of humans. The policy comes in various strengths in terms of (a.) how wide a range of uncertainty to tolerate, and (b.) how high a bar is required for legitimate disputability. More on this in a future post, I hope.)

Today, I want to highlight another design policy Garza and I advocated in 2015: The Emotional Alignment Design Policy.

Design AI systems so that ordinary users have emotional reactions appropriate to the systems' genuine moral status.

Joanna Bryson articulates one half of this design policy in her well-known (and in my view unfortunately titled) article "Robots Should Be Slaves". According to Bryson, robots -- and AI systems in general -- are disposable tools and should be treated as such. User interfaces that encourage people to think of AI systems as anything more than disposable tools -- for example, as real companions, capable of genuine pleasure or suffering -- should be discouraged. We don't want ordinary people fooled into thinking it would be morally wrong to delete their AI "friend". And we don't want people sacrificing real human interests for what are basically complicated toasters.

Now to be clear, I think tools -- and even rocks -- can and should be valued. There's something a bit gratingly consumerist about the phrase "disposable tools" that I am inclined to use here. But I do want to highlight the difference in the type of moral status possessed, say, by a beautiful automobile versus that possessed by a human, cat, or even maybe garden snail.

The other half of the Emotional Alignment Design Policy, which goes beyond Bryson, is this: If we do someday create AI entities with real moral considerability similar to non-human animals or similar to humans, we should design them so that ordinary users will emotionally react to them in a way that is appropriate to their moral status. Don't design a human-grade AI capable of real pain and suffering, with human-like goals, rationality, and thoughts of the future, and put it in a bland box that people would be inclined to casually reformat. And if the AI warrants an intermediate level of concern -- similar, say, to a pet cat -- then give it an interface that encourages users to give it that amount of concern and no more.

I have two complementary concerns here.

One -- the nearer-term concern -- is that tech companies will be motivated to create AI systems that users emotionally attach to. Consider, for example, Replika, advertised as "the world's best AI friend". You can design an avatar for the Replika chat-bot, give it a name, and buy it clothes. You can continue conversations with it over the course of days, months, even years, and it will remember aspects of your previous interactions. Ordinary users sometimes report falling in love with their Replika. With a paid subscription, you can get Replika to send you "spicy" selfies, and it's not too hard to coax into erotic chat. (This feature was apparently toned down in February after word got out that children were having "adult" conversations with Replika.)

Now I'm inclined to doubt that ordinary users will fall in love with the current version of Replika in a way that is importantly different from how a child might love a teddy bear or a vintage automobile enthusiast might love their 1920 Model T. We know to leave these things behind in a real emergency. Reformatting or discontinuing Replika might be upsetting to people who are attached, but I don't think ordinary users would regard it as the moral equivalent of murder.

My worry is that it might not take too many more steps of technological improvement before ordinary users can become confused and can come to form emotional connections that are inappropriate to the type of thing that AI currently is. If we put our best chatbot in an attractive, furry pet-like body, give it voice-to-text and text-to-speech interfaces so that you can talk to it orally, give it an emotionally expressive face and tone of voice, give it long-term memory of previous interactions as context for new interactions -- well, then maybe users do really start to fall more seriously in love or at least treat it as being as having the moral standing of a pet mammal. This might be so even with technology not much different from what we currently have, about which there is generally expert consensus that it lacks meaningful moral standing.

It's easy to imagine how tech companies might be motivated to encourage inflated attachment to AI systems. Attached users will have high product loyalty. They will pay for monthly subscriptions. They will buy enhancements and extras. We already see a version of this with Replika. The Emotional Alignment Design Policy puts a lid on this: It should be clear that this is an interactive teddy-bear, nothing more. Buy cute clothes for your teddy bear, sure! But forgo the $4000 cancer treatment you might give to a beloved dog.

The longer-term concern is the converse: that tech companies will be inclined to make AI systems disposable even if those AI systems, eventually, are really conscious or sentient and really deserve rights. This possibility has been imagined over and over in science fiction, from Asimov's robot stories through Star Trek: The Next Generation, Black Mirror, and West World.

Now there is, I think, one thing a bit unrealistic about those fictions: The disposable AI systems are designed to look human or humanoid in a way that engages users' sympathy. (Maybe that's a function of the fictional medium: From a fiction-writing perspective, humanlike features help engage readers' and viewers' sympathy.) More realistic, probably, is the idea that if the tech companies want to minimize annoying protests about AI rights, they will give the robots or AI systems bland, not-at-all-humanlike interfaces that minimize sympathetic reactions, such as the shipboard computer in Star Trek or the boxy robots in Interstellar.

[the boxy TARS robot from Interstellar; source]

The fundamental problem in both directions is that companies' profit incentives might misalign with AI systems' moral status. For some uses, companies might be incentivized to trick users into overattributing moral status, to extract additional money from overly attached users. In other cases, companies might be incentivized to downplay the moral status of their creations -- for example, if consciousness/sentience proves to be a useful feature to build into the most sophisticated future AI workers.

The Emotional Alignment Design Policy, if adhered to, will reduce these moral risks.

Presentations, May 29 - April 6

I have some travel and talks coming up. If you're interested and in the area, and if the hosting institution permits, please come by!

Mar 29: Claremont McKenna College, Athenaeum Lecture: Falling in Love with Machines

Mar 30: University of Washington, Seattle, brown bag discussion: Moral Reflection and Moral Behavior [probably closed to outsiders]

Mar 30: University of Washington, Seattle, brown bag discussion: The Demographics of Philosophy [probably closed to outsiders]

Mar 31: University of Puget Sound, Undergraduate Philosophy Conference keynote: Does Studying Ethics Make People More Ethical?

Apr 2 (remote): Northeastern University, Information Ethics Roundtable: Let's Hope We're Not Living in a Simulation

Apr 3: University of California, Office of the President (Oakland): Principles Governing Online Majors. [This one is definitely not public, but I welcome readers' thoughts about what University of California policy should be regarding the approval of online majors.]

Apr 5: American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division (San Francisco), Society for the Philosophy of Animal Minds: The Mind of a Garden Snail, or What Is It to Have a Mind?

Apr 5: American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division (San Francisco), Science Fiction and Philosophy Society: TBD, either Science Fiction as Philosophy or Science Fiction and Large Language Models.

Apr 6: American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division (San Francisco), Book Symposium on David Chalmers' Reality+: Let's Hope We're Not Living in a Simulation

Yes, that's nine presentations in nine days, on seven different topics. Perhaps I'm spreading myself a little thin!

Don't Create AI Systems of Disputable Moral Status (Redux)

[originally published at Daily Nous, Mar. 14, as part of a symposium on large language models, ed. Annette Zimmerman]

Engineers will likely soon be able to create AI systems whose moral status is legitimately disputable. We will then need to decide whether to treat such systems as genuinely deserving of our care and solicitude. Error in either direction could be morally catastrophic. If we underattribute moral standing, we risk unwittingly perpetrating great harms on our creations. If we overattribute moral standing, we risk sacrificing real human interests for AI systems without interests worth the sacrifice.

The solution to this dilemma is to avoid creating AI systems of disputable moral status.

Both engineers and ordinary users have begun to wonder whether the most advanced language models, such as GPT-3, LaMDA, and Bing/Sydney might be sentient or conscious, and thus deserving of rights or moral consideration. Although few experts think that any currently existing AI systems have a meaningful degree of consciousness, some theories of consciousness imply that we are close to creating conscious AI. Even if you the reader personally suspect AI consciousness won’t soon be achieved, appropriate epistemic humility requires acknowledging doubt. Consciousness science is contentious, with leading experts endorsing a wide range of theories.

Probably, then, it will soon be legitimately disputable whether the most advanced AI systems are conscious. If genuine consciousness is sufficient for moral standing, then the moral standing of those systems will also be legitimately disputable. Different criteria for moral standing might produce somewhat different theories about the boundaries of the moral gray zone, but most reasonable criteria—capacity for suffering, rationality, embeddedness in social relationships—admit of interpretations on which the gray zone is imminent.

We might adopt a conservative policy: Only change our policies and laws once there’s widespread consensus that the AI systems really do warrant care and solicitude. However, this policy is morally risky: If it turns out that AI systems have genuine moral standing before the most conservative theorists would acknowledge that they do, the likely outcome is immense harm—the moral equivalents of slavery and murder, potentially at huge scale—before law and policy catch up.

A liberal policy might therefore seem ethically safer: Change our policies and laws to protect AI systems as soon as it’s reasonable to think they might deserve such protection. But this is also risky. As soon as we grant an entity moral standing, we commit to sacrificing real human interests on its behalf. In general, we want to be able to control our machines. We want to be able to delete, update, or reformat programs, assigning them to whatever tasks best suit our purposes.

If we grant AI systems rights, we constrain our capacity to manipulate and dispose of them. If we go so far as to grant some AI systems equal rights with human beings, presumably we should give them a path to citizenship and the right to vote, with potentially transformative societal effects. If the AI systems genuinely are our moral equals, that might be morally required, even wonderful. But if liberal views of AI moral standing are mistaken, we might end up sacrificing substantial human interests for an illusion.

Intermediate policies are possible. But it would be amazing good luck if we happened upon a policy that gave the whole range of advanced AI systems exactly the moral consideration they deserve, no more and no less. Our moral policies for non-human animals, people with disabilities, and distant strangers are already confused enough, without adding a new potential source of grievous moral error.

We can avoid the underattribution/overattribution dilemma by declining to create AI systems of disputable moral status. Although this might delay our race toward ever fancier technologies, delay is appropriate if the risks of speed are serious.

In the meantime, we should also ensure that ordinary users are not confused about the moral status of their AI systems. Some degree of attachment to artificial AI “friends” is probably fine or even desirable—like a child’s attachment to a teddy bear or a gamer’s attachment to their online characters. But users know the bear and the character aren’t sentient. We will readily abandon them in an emergency.

But if a user is fooled into thinking that a non-conscious system really is capable of pleasure and pain, they risk being exploited into sacrificing too much on its behalf. Unscrupulous technology companies might even be motivated to foster such illusions, knowing that it will increase customer loyalty, engagement, and willingness to pay monthly fees.

Engineers should either create machines that plainly lack any meaningful degree of consciousness or moral status, making clear in the user interface that this is so, or they should go all the way (if ever it’s possible) to creating machines on whose moral status reasonable people can all agree. We should avoid the moral risks that the confusing middle would force upon us.

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Notes

For a deeper dive into these issues, see “The Full Rights Dilemma for AI Systems of Debatable Personhood” (in draft) and “Designing AI with Rights, Consciousness, Self-Respect, and Freedom” (with Mara Garza; in Liao, ed., The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford: 2020).

See also Is it time to start considering personhood rights for AI chatbots? (with Henry Shevlin), in the Los Angeles Times (Mar 5).

[image: Dall-E 2 "robot dying in a fire"]

New Paper in Draft: Let's Hope We're Not Living in a Simulation

I'll be presenting an abbreviated version of this at the Pacific APA in April, as a commentary on David Chalmers' book Reality+.

According to the simulation hypothesis, we might be artificial intelligences living in a virtual reality.  Advocates of this hypothesis, such as Chalmers, Bostrom, and Steinhart, tend to argue that the skeptical consequences aren’t as severe as they might appear.  In Reality+, Chalmers acknowledges that although he can’t be certain that the simulation we inhabit, if we inhabit a simulation, is larger than city-sized and has a long past, simplicity considerations speak against those possibilities.  I argue, in contrast, that cost considerations might easily outweigh considerations of simplicity, favoring simulations that are catastrophically small or brief – small or brief enough that a substantial proportion of our everyday beliefs would be false or lack reference in virtue of the nonexistence of things or events whose existence we ordinarily take for granted.  More generally, we can’t justifiably have high confidence that if we live in a simulation it’s a large and stable one.  Furthermore, if we live in a simulation, we are likely at the mercy of ethically abhorrent gods, which makes our deaths and suffering morally worse than they would be if there were no such gods.  There are reasons both epistemic and axiological to hope that we aren’t living in a simulation.

Paper here.

As always, comments welcome!

Don't Create AI Systems of Disputable Moral Status (op-ed version)

Check out my op-ed today, with Henry Shevlin, in the Los Angeles Times.

God Stumbles Over the Power Cord

Princeton University Press generously hired an illustrator to create some images for my forthcoming book, The Weirdness of the World (forthcoming January 2024).

Here's an illustration for my chapter "Kant Meets Cyberpunk" -- a revised and expanded version of this article from 2019, concerning the epistemic and metaphysical consequences of living in a computer simulation.