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.)

The Base Rate of Kant

People sometimes say that increasing specialization within philosophy means that there could never be another figure like Locke or Hume or Kant -- a figure with giant impact across a broad range of philosophical subdisciplines. The massive growth of the research university has created armies of specialists in each subfield whose copious volumes one must master to become a major player in the subfield; and no one person could master the work of a broad range of subfields.

Let's consider the merits of this theory.

First: Is there any need for a theory to explain the recent lack of Kants? Well, what's the base rate of Kant? We could calculate rate per century or we could calculate rate per professional philosopher.

Consider by century: It seems plausible that no philosopher of at least the past 60 years has achieved the kind of huge, broad impact of Locke, Hume, or Kant. Lewis, Quine, Rawls, and Foucault had huge impacts in clusters of areas but not across as broad a range of areas. Others like McDowell and Rorty have had substantial impact in a broad range of areas but not impact of near-Kantian magnitude. Going back another several decades we get perhaps some near misses, including Wittgenstein, Russell, Heidegger, and Nietzsche, who worked ambitiously in a wide range of areas but whose impact across that range was uneven. Going back two centuries brings in Hegel, Mill, Marx, and Comte about whom historical judgment seems to be highly spatiotemporally variable. In contrast, Locke, Hume, and Kant span a bit over a century between them. But still, three within about hundred years followed by a 200 year break with some near misses isn't really anomalous if we're comparing a peak against an ordinary run.

(I don't mention Descartes despite his huge importance because he didn't have the same kind of impact in ethics/political as did the other three. Also, here is evidence that my judgments about importance aren't too idiosyncratic.)

If we consider the rate of Kants per thousand working professional philosophers, it does seem to be vastly higher in the early modern era than recently. But field-changing ideas can only occur so fast -- probably not much more than once per generation per subfield, since few philosophers are going to be ready to retool every ten years for the newest thing. Probably Kant rate per generation, in cultures with lively enough philosophical communities, is a better way to conceptualize the denominator of the expected base rate.

Thus, I don't think that the recent lack of Kants is a fact so anomalous that it cries out for explanation. There's only so much space at the top for heroes and field definers. Inevitably, Kants will be rare.

But maybe it's still true that the size of the community in each subfield makes it impossible for any one philosopher in the foreseeable future to have a huge impact across the subfields? Maybe a new Kant simply couldn't arise in a discipline as populous as 21st century philosophy? I see two reasons for skepticism about that theory.

(1.) People with huge impact are sometimes young. This was true historically (e.g., Hume was 26 when he finished the Treatise) and it seems to be still true (e.g., Lewis did much of his most influential work when he was in his 20s and 30s). If Lewis (or Kripke, or Chalmers, or...) could master enough of one subfield in 10 years to have a huge impact by age 30, then by age 60 -- and philosophers are by no means washed out by age 60 -- they ought to be able to master, well enough to potentially have a huge impact, several disparate subfields. Nor does it seem that there should be substantial barriers to this in practice. Although sociologically it would be difficult to leap from math to philosophy to physics to have huge impacts in all three fields -- so maybe there will never be another Descartes -- philosophy is not so sociologically divided. Setting aside language-driven divides, the sharpest sociological divide seems to be between "value theory" fields (ethics/aesthetics/political) and "LEMMings" fields (language/epistemology/metaphysics/mind plus logic). But even that divide is quite permeable. There are plenty of philosophers with interests and ambitions on both sides of the divide, and no one finds it odd.

(2.) Across academia as a whole, field-transforming contributions are sometimes achieved by adopting a novel angle or method and then applying it fruitfully both to traditional problems and to new previously unthought-of problems. In philosophy, this means having a new (implicit or explicit) metaphilosophy. Although none of the metaphilosophical revolutions of the past hundred years have generated a Kant, I think we can imagine how they might have, had things played out somewhat differently. Had there been a single dominant figure in the linguistic turn who managed to compellingly apply early linguistic-turnish thoughts to both metaphysics and epistemology and to ethics and political philosophy, that person might have had approximately Kant-sized influence. I see no reason to think such a scenario implausibly unlikely. Similarly, there could have been, I think, a Kant-sized ordinary language philosopher or logical positivist. More recently -- in my opinion! -- philosophy has received a charge of new ideas from the methods and results of empirical psychology, now that psychology has matured past Freudian and behaviorist strictures. People like Jesse Prinz and Shaun Nichols have been able to master enough of the literature in disparate areas of philosophy to have impact in those areas partly through applying methods and ideas from psychology. So I see no reason a great philosopher couldn't arise with a fresh angle, a new approach, applied compellingly to a broad range of the biggest issues, with a consequent Kant-like impact. We won't see it coming in advance -- but that's just us, stuck in our paradigms. Although it is impossible to have encyclopedic mastery of the ever-increasing existing literature across a wide range of subfields of philosophy, such encyclopedic mastery has never been a prerequisite of field-changing genius.

Caveats:

* This isn't to say that I'm particularly fond of Kant! I'm just making a sociological point, and he seems the best example. (See here and here for rough criticism.)

* One way in which it might be harder now to have a broad impact across subfields with a new approach is that once that approach catches on in one subfield, there will be a larger pool of people than there used to be who might quickly adopt it to other subfields, attenuating the aspiring Great Philosopher's direct impact on those subfields.

* Our perspective on the past is probably distorted by the Winnowing of Greats. Appropriately winnowed, maybe David Lewis (or whoever) will some day stand out like Kant. (And yes, I know that much of this post in is conflict with much of that earlier post. I take an appropriately Whitmanian attitude.)

Broad-Ranging Interview on My Work

by Richard Marshall, here at 3:AM Magazine. Rereading the interview now, I find myself pretty happy with it, other than that I probably should have given somewhat briefer answers to the first few questions.

This interview does a nice job of motivating and tying together, in an accessible way, the various themes of my work, which might otherwise seem to be unconnected (history of psychology, Chinese philosophy, the moral behavior of ethicists, science fiction, the untrustworthiness of philosophical intuition...).

Kant Meets Cyberpunk

In 1992, my first year of graduate school, I read William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer and, by chance, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason at the same time. It seemed to me that the two were intimately connected, but various older grad students in my Kant class pooh-poohed my ideas about this and I lacked the intellectual confidence to pursue it farther.

But the thought has stayed with me. In Neuromancer, like in Tron, there's an artificial environment that one can travel in virtually. One "enters" it by jacking into a neural interface. Also like Tron, but unlike The Matrix, the artificial environment of Neuromancer substantially differs in its basic structural features from the real-world environment. Derived from early computer graphics programs, Neuromancer's cyberspace matrix is composed of lines of light arranged into geometrical figures in simple colors; space is experienced in discrete units and movement is in rectangular clicks. As I seem to remember having imagined it, and as we might as well imagine it for present purposes (though now looking through the text, this not accurate), everything is laid out rectilinearly and the only colors are simple primaries.

So now imagine that you were born jacked into such a matrix. You might think that objects were necessarily laid out in straight lines at right angles and possessed of only primary colors, and that space came in discrete units. But this would be a feature, not of things as they are "in themselves", but rather of how your mind processes the structured input it is given. We might even imagine (and maybe it's true) that a human mind that developed in such a matrix couldn't even conceive of curves, oblique angles, tertiary colors, or continuous space. For such a mind, objects as presented in the cyberspace matrix would be the only empirically available reality, and what we non-cyberspace-embedded folks consider to be the real world would be an incomprehensible "noumenal realm" behind those appearances. Conversely, we might imagine -- though it's impossible to depict vividly in a novel -- this matrix-grown strange baby to have new sensory modalities and new basic ways of cognizing the world that are unfamiliar to us, especially if its brain is artificially enhanced (a fourth "spatial" dimension for matrix-informational layout would be a conservative start).

The analogy to Kant is imperfect. Kantian purists will, I suppose, cringe at the comparison. Time, causation, three-dimensionality, and many other properties are shared by the Neuromancer matrix and the reality outside of the matrix. And the features of the matrix available to the embedded mind might not be given "a priori" in a strict Kantian sense (whatever Kant's sense is). I'm sure there are other important disanalogies too. But as a way of getting a toehold on the Kantian picture, I still rather like the comparison. We are born into naturally given matrixes that necessarily structure our experiential encounter with the world, and out of which we cannot break, even in imagination. All this that I see and hear is just user interface.

Such thoughts are doubly apt, perhaps, if we are actually already living in a giant computer simulation.

Consciousness Online

Consciousness Online is an online consciousness conference now in its fourth year, organized by Richard Brown. It will be happening February 17 to March 2. The program has a terrific line-up of speakers. Check it out!

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind: Short, Folksy Version

Crazyism in the metaphysics of mind, as I define it, is the view that something bizarre and undeserving of credence -- something "crazy" -- must be among the core truths about the metaphysics of mind.

On December 3, I presented a short, folksy version of this idea as a TEDx talk for the first of hopefully many TEDxUCR events. (Thanks, TEDxUCR organizers!) If you want more than a blog post but less than a 40-page manuscript (plus references), you might be interested to see the (poor quality but audible) TEDx video or prepared text.

For All X, There's Philosophy of X...

... one only needs to plunge to the foundation. The issues at the foundation are always the same: What there really is, how we know about it, what separates the good from the bad.

If one delves deeply enough, with sufficient generality and abstraction, the foundational issues about X will reveal their kinship with foundational issues in other areas. Discussion of them can thus be illuminated by knowledge of how similar issues are treated in other areas -- the philosopher's special expertise.

Consider the philosophy of hair, for example. At the foundation: What is a haircut, really? How much does it depend on the intent of the hairdresser? What makes a haircut good or bad? For example, must it please its bearer? Is it relative to fashion, and if so how locally? How, if at all, can we settle disputes about the quality of a haircut? A true philosopher of hair will have informed opinions about such matters. The answers to these questions might differ from the answers to similar questions about, say, painting as an art or about the morality of charitable giving, but a family resemblance should be evident, along with the possibility of cross-fertilization.

Consider also: The philosophy of Coke cans, the philosophy of starlight, the philosophy of football, the philosophy of birds, the philosophy of siblinghood.

To the person with the right turn of mind, perhaps, all thought becomes philosophy.

Is Solipsism Simple?

Solipsism is the view that nothing exists but one's own stream of conscious experience. In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Bertrand Russell says that although it's logically possible that solipsism is true, solipsism should be rejected as less simple than the hypothesis that an external world exists. But is realism about the external world really simpler than solipsism?

On the face of it, you might think solipsism is simpler. After all, it involves radically fewer entities. That's the great Ockhamesque beauty of it. Solipsism may be crazy, but at least it's simple!

Russell employs two arguments against the simplicity of solipsism. First:

If [a] cat exists whether I see it or not, we can understand from our own experience how it gets hungry between one meal and the next; but if it does not exist when I am not seeing it, it seems odd that appetite should grow during non-existence as fast as during existence (p. 23).

Second:

When human beings speak -- that is, when we hear certain noises which we associate with ideas, and simultaneously see certain motions of lips and expressions of face -- it is very difficult to suppose that what we hear is not the expression of thought, as we know it would be if we emitted the same sounds (p. 23-24).

Thus, he concludes, "every principle of simplicity urges us to adopt the natural view, that there really are objects other than ourselves" (p. 24).

Now, I'm inclined to think that Russell's argument here is very inadequate. But let me quickly say that I've found it surprisingly difficult to uncover what I'd consider to be better arguments against solipsism in the philosophical literature. Plus, Russell is famous! So let's take him seriously.

To see the core problem with Russell's argument, consider dreams. In dreams, cats can grow quite quickly hungry between appearances, despite their nonexistence in the interval. And the voices and faces seen in dreams reveal the real existence of no other independent mind. It seems no great violation of simplicity to suppose that, in a dream, the appearances of the cat and the voices and faces are concocted on the spot by me. No need to posit a giant, really existing universe, light-years upon light-years wide! And the solipsist, it seems, can just treat waking experiences the same way. Simple!

Russell is of course aware of dream skepticism, addressing it thus:

But dreams are more or less suggested by what we call waking life, and are capable of being more or less accounted for on scientific principles if we assume there really is a physical world (p. 24).

I think one might just as easily turn this argument on its head. If we assume solipsism rather than realism, we can invoke principles explaining why cats and people seem to behave as they do: They are imperfect projections of me upon my imagined world, based on what I know from introspection about myself. That theory is of course sketchy and incomplete, but so is the current scientific account of the content of dreams!

Now it might seem that postulating an external world behind appearances can at least explain correlations that must remain unexplained in solipsism. For example, if there is a real penny that I'm both looking at and manually rotating, the real existence of arm and coin explains why such-and-such changes in visual experience co-occur with such-and-such changes in tactile and proprioceptive experience.

I see two obvious replies for the solipsist:

First, why can't it simply be a law of my experience that such-and-such tactile and proprioceptive experiences will tend to co-occur with such-and-such visual experiences? Surely there's a theoretically discoverable structure to such co-occurrences -- a structure not so different, perhaps, and probably simpler, than that employed in the realist's account of tactile and visual perception and motor control and its relation to external objects. After all, realists' psychological theories, if they're really going to explain the relation among the experiences, require complicated overlapping and competing brain mechanisms for determining, among other things, visual shape and orientation from optical input.

And second, if simplicity really favors the theory with fewer unexplained coincidences, won't solipsism win hands down, even if it leaves a few things unexplained that the realist can explain? The small world of the solipsist will have vastly fewer such coincidences in total, and vastly fewer free parameters, than the enormously large, fine-textured, and richly populated world of the realist.

Call for Papers: Consciousness and Moral Cognition

The editors at Review of Philosophy and Psychology invite submissions for a special issue on consciousness attribution in moral cognition. Guest authors include: Kurt Gray (Maryland), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) and Justin Sytsma (East Tennessee State), and Anthony I. Jack (Case Western Reserve) and Philip Robbins (Missouri).

Submissions are due March 31, 2011.

The full CFP, including relevant dates and submission details, is available here.

Abbreviated CFP: When people regard other entities as objects of ethical concern whose interests must be taken into account in moral deliberations, does the attribution of consciousness to these entities play an essential role in the process? In recent years, philosophers and psychologists have begun to sketch limited answers to this general question. However, much progress remains to be made. We invite contributions to a special issue of The Review of Philosophy and Psychology on the role of consciousness attribution in moral cognition from researchers working in fields including developmental, evolutionary, perceptual, and social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy.

Against Increasing the Power of Grant Agencies in Philosophy

Clark Glymour has an opinion piece urging philosophers to reach out beyond their disciplinary circles and encouraging the pursuit of big-dollar grants. Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman say much the same thing. (Glymour emphasizes philosophy of science and Briggle & Frodeman applied ethics.) I agree that philosophers as a group should reach out more than they do. But I think the increasing emphasis on grant-getting in academia is a disease to be fought, not a trend to be encouraged.

Academic research scientists spend a lot of time applying for grant money. This is time that they are not spending doing scientific research. I've often heard that applying for an NSF grant takes about as much time as writing a journal article. Now, most scientists need money to do their research and there should be mechanisms to fund worthy projects, so maybe for them passionate summers of grant application are a worthy investment. But do philosophers need to be doing that? I doubt philosophy is best served by encouraging philosophers to spend more time thinking up ways to request money.

Furthermore, for both scientists and philosophers I think a better model would be a hybrid in which it is possible to apply for grants but in which, also, productive researchers could be awarded research money without having to apply for it. Look, V.S. Ramachandran is going to do something interesting with his research money no matter what, right? Philip Kitcher too. Let them spend their time doing what they do best and monitor the funds post facto. Let us all have a certain small amount of money to attend (and sometimes organize) conferences, without our having to manufacture elaborate bureaucratic pleas in advance. The same total funding could go out, with much less time wasted, if grant writing were only for exceptional cases and exceptional expenses.

A very different type of reason to resist the increasing academic focus on grant-getting is this: Grant-driven bureaucracy decreases the power of researchers to set their own research agenda and increases the power of the grant agencies to set the agenda. Maybe that's part of what Glymour and Briggle & Frodeman want, since they seem to distrust philosophers' ability to choose worthy topics of research for themselves. But philosophy in particular has often been advanced by people working outside the mainstream, on projects that might not have been seen as valuable by the well-established old-school researchers and administrators that tend to serve on grant committees. In ancient Greece, the sophists were the ones getting grants, while Socrates was fightin the powa.

If you want to apply for grants, terrific! I have no problem with that. Get some good money to do your good work. Organize an interesting conference; fly across the world to thumb through the archives; get some time away from teaching to write your book. Absolutely! But let's not try to push the discipline as a whole more into the grant-getting game than it already is.

Frege's Puzzle and In-Between Cases of Believing

There's a huge literature in philosophy of language on what's called "Frege's puzzle" about belief reports. Almost all the participants in this literature seem to take for granted something that I reject: that sentences ascribing beliefs must be determinately true or false, at least once those sentences are disambiguated or contextualized in the right way.

Frege's puzzle is this. Lois Lane believes, it seems, that Superman is strong. And Clark Kent is, of course, Superman. So it seems to follow that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. But Lois would deny that Clark Kent is strong, and it seems wrong to say that she believes it. So what's going on? There are several standard options, but all lead to trouble of one sort or another. (If you don't like Superman, try Twain/Clemens or Unabomber/Kaczynski.)

On a dispositional approach to belief of the sort I favor, to believe some proposition P -- the proposition, say, that that guy (variously known as "Superman" or "Clark Kent") is strong -- is to be disposed to act and react, both outwardly and inwardly, as though P were true. (On my version of dispositionalism, this means being disposed to act and react in ways that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of belief that P.) Lois has some such dispositions: For example, she's disposed to say "Superman is strong". But she notably lacks others: She's not disposed to say "Clark Kent is strong". She's disposed to ask Superman/Clark Kent to lift her up in the air when he's in costume but not when he's in street clothes.

Personality traits also involve clusters of dispositions, so consider them as an analogy. If someone is disposed to be courageous in some circumstances and not courageous in other circumstances, it might be neither quite right to say that she is courageous nor quite right to say that she isn't. "Courageous" is a vague predicate, and we might have an in-between case, in which neither simple ascription nor simple denial is entirely appropriate (though there may also be contexts in which simple ascription or denial works well enough -- e.g., battlefields vs. faculty meetings if she has battlefield courage but not interpersonal courage). Compare also "Amir is tall", said of a man who is 5'11". Lois's belief about Superman/Clark Kent might similarly be an in-between case in the application of a vague predicate.

You'll probably object that Lois simply and fully believes that Superman is strong, and it's not an in-between case at all. I have two replies. First, that way of putting it -- in terms of Superman rather than Clark Kent -- highlights certain aspects of Lois's dispositional profile over others, thus creating a conversational context that tends to favor believes-strong ascription (like a battlefield context might favor ascription of courage to a person who has battlefield courage but not other sorts of courage). Second, consider a version of the case in which the belief ascriber doesn't have the name "Clark Kent" available, but only the name "Superman". The ascriber and his friend are looking through a window at Superman/Clark Kent in street clothes. The ascriber's friend, who doesn't know that Lois is deceived, asks, "Does Lois believe that Superman is strong?" What should the ascriber reply? He should say, "Well, um, it's a complicated case!" I see no point in insisting that underneath that hedge there needs to be a determinate metaphysical or psychological or (disambiguated [update Dec. 16: e.g., "de re / de dicto"]) linguistic fact that yes-she-really-does (or no-she-really-doesn't), any more than there always has to be a determinate fact about whether someone is tall simpliciter or courageous simpliciter.

Now this is a heck of a mess in philosophy of language, and I haven't thought through all the implications. I'm inclined to think that excessive realism about the identity of propositions is part of the problem too. I don't claim that this is a full or non-problematic solution to Frege's puzzle. But it seems to me that this general type of approach should be more visible among the options than it is.

[HT: Lewis Powell on Kripke's Puzzle.]

Descartes, Moore, Whatevs!

On Nature's website:

“Descartes said that if there's something you can be certain of in this world, it's that your hand is your hand,” says Ehrsson.

Um, whoops! Descartes said that what he couldn't doubt was his own thinking. It was G.E. Moore who famously said it would be absurd to suggest that he didn't know that "here is a hand".

Descartes, G.E. Moore, whatever! It's only philosophy, after all -- not something worth bothering to get right in the the flagship journal of the natural sciences.

(If I sound prickly, maybe it's because I'm currently on hold with AT&T, about to talk to my eleventh representative in two months about being double billed for internet service.)

Update, Dec. 15: The author of the piece has now corrected the error. It turns out that philosophy is worth getting right after all!

Creativity and Dishonesty

A recent paper by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely suggests that relatively creative people are more likely to be dishonest than are relatively less creative people because they are better at concocting rationalizations for potential dishonesty. I can't say I'm entirely swooned by Gino & Ariely's methodology, which measures dishonesty by seeing whether people will give wrong answers in psychology laboratory studies when they are paid to give those wrong answers. (If psychologist says: "Roll a die, I'm not going to check the outcome, but I'll pay you $1 if you say it's a 1 and $6 if you say it's a 6", how exactly should the participant react to what's going on here?) I'd rather see more naturalistic observations of behavior in real-life situations, or at least better cover stories. Nor do I think Gino & Ariely do a terrific job of establishing that ability to creatively rationalize is the real mediator of the apparent difference in honesty.

Nonetheless, the conclusion is interesting, the mechanism plausible, and the results at least suggestive. And their picture fits nicely with my favorite hypothesis about the apparent fact that professional ethicists behave no morally better than do socially similar non-ethicists. Philosophical moral reflection, I'm inclined to think, rather than being inert, is bivalent: On the one hand, it highlights the moral dimension of things and can help you appreciate moral truths; but on the other hand, people who are skilled at it will also be skilled at finding superficially plausible rationalizations of attractive misconduct which might then allow them to feel freer to engage in that misconduct (e.g., stealing a library book). Professional ethicists develop their creativity in exactly an area in which being creative brings substantial moral hazards.

The Baby Boom Philosophy Bust

In 2010, I compiled a list of the top 200 most-cited contemporary authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (By "contemporary" I mean born in 1900 or later.) One striking feature of this list is the underrepresentation of baby boomers, especially near the top.

Let's compare the representation of people born 1931-1945 (the fifteen years before the baby boom) with those born in 1946-1960 (the bulk of the baby boom), among the top 25.

Among the pre-baby boomers, we find:

David Lewis (#1)
Saul Kripke (#6)
Thomas Nagel (tied #7)
Jerry Fodor (#9)
Daniel Dennett (tied #10)
Frank Jackson (tied #10)
Robert Nozick (tied #13)
John Searle (tied #13)
Gilbert Harman (#16)
Ronald Dworkin (#18)
Joseph Raz (tied #19)
Bas Van Fraassen (tied #19)
Fred Dretske (tied #22)
Peter Van Inwagen (tied #22)
Alvin Goldman (tied #24).

Among the baby boomers we find:

Martha Nussbaum (tied #19)
Philip Kitcher (tied #24).

These numbers seem to suggest that the depression-era and World War II babies have had a much larger impact than the baby boomers on mainstream Anglophone philosophy.

You might have thought the reverse would be the case. Aren't there more baby boomers? Haven't baby boomers been culturally dominant in other areas of society? So what's going on here?

One possibility is that the boomers haven't yet had time to achieve maximum influence on the field. Someone born in 1940 has had ten more years to write and to influence peers and students than has someone born in 1950. Although I think there is something to this thought, especially for the younger boomers, I suspect it's not the primary explanation. A boomer born in 1950 would be sixty years old by 2010. The large majority of philosophers who have a big impact on the field achieve a substantial proportion of that impact well before the age of sixty. Certainly that's true of the top philosophers on the list above -- Lewis, Kripke, Nagel, and Fodor. Their most influential work was in the 1960s to early 1990s. The boomers have had plenty of time to generate the same kind of influence, if it were simply a matter of catching up from a later start. In fact, contemporary Anglophone philosophers seem to have their average peak influence from about age 55-70, declining thereafter. On average, the baby boomers should be enjoying peak citation rates right now, and the depression babies should be starting to wane.

Here's an alternative diagnosis: College enrollment grew explosively in the 1960s and then flattened out. The pre-baby-boomers were hired in large numbers in the 1960s to teach the baby boomers. The pre-baby boomers rose quickly to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s and set the agenda for philosophy during that period. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, the pre-baby-boomers remained dominant. During the 1980s, when the baby boomers should have been exploding onto the philosophical scene, they instead struggled to find faculty positions, journal space, and professional attention in a field still dominated by the depression-era and World War II babies.

This started to change, I think, with the retirement of the depression babies and the hiring boom of Gen-Xers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It remains to be seen if history will repeat itself.