The External World: Further Experimental Evidence of Its Existence

(collaborative with Alan Moore)

It occurs to me to doubt whether the external world exists -- that is, whether anything exists other than my own stream of conscious experience. Radical solipsism is of course crazy. But can I show it to be wrong? Or is my only recourse simply to assume it's wrong, since any attempt at proof would be circular? Can I break out of the solipsistic circle, using facts about my own stream of experience, knowable from within the solipsistic perspective, to license an inference to the existence of something beyond my stream of experience?

The most famous philosophical attempts to prove the existence of an external world from solipsism-compatible assumptions and methods -- for example, Descartes's and Kant's -- are generally acknowledged by the philosophical community to fail.  I'm inclined to think those attempts fail because they set the bar too high: They aim for certainty through deductive proof.  Better, perhaps, to aim lower -- to use scientific methods and scientific standards, licensing only tentative conclusions as the current best explanation of the available evidence. In another way, too, I aim low: I aim only to refute solipsistic doubts in particular, not other sorts of skeptical doubts such as doubts about memory or reasoning. In fact, I will take the general standards of science for granted, insofar as those general standards are compatible with solipsism. I aim to do solipsistic science.

Last year on my blog I presented the results of two experiments designed to provide evidence that an external world does indeed exist. The first experiment suggested that something exists ("my computer") that is swifter than I at calculating prime numbers. The second experiment suggested that the world has some constancy to it that exceeds the constancy of my memory. Today, I will report on a third experiment.

If solipsism is true, nothing in the universe should exist that is better than I am at chess. Nothing should exist with chess-playing practical capacities that exceed my own. Now I believe that I stink at chess, and my seeming student "Alan" seems to have told me that he is good at chess. If solipsism is true, then he should not be able to beat me at rates higher than statistical chance. I agreed with this seeming-Alan to play twenty games of speed chess, with a limit of about five seconds per move.

Here is what seems to be a picture of our procedure:
(photo credit: seeming-Gerardo Sanchez)

The results: seeming-Alan won 17, I won 2, and one stalemate. 17/19 is statistically higher than 50%, p < .001 (hand calculated).

It occurs to me that I might have hoped to lose, so as to generate results confirming my preferred hypothesis that the external world exists. Against this concern, I comfort myself with the following thoughts: If it was an unconscious desire to lose, then that implies that something exists in the universe besides my own stream of conscious experience, namely, an unconscious part of my mind. So radical solipsism is false. If it was, instead, a conscious desire to lose, I should have been able to detect it, barring an unusual degree of introspective skepticism. What I detected was a desire to win as many games as I could, given my background assumption that if Alan actually exists I would be hard pressed to win even one or two games. I found myself repeatedly and forcefully struck by the impression that the universe contained a practical intelligence superior to my own and bent on defeating me -- an impression, of course, confirmed by the results. The most natural scientific explanation of the pattern in my experience is that that impression is correct.

I might easily enough dream of being consistently defeated in chess. But dreams of this sort, as I seem to remember, differ from the present experiment in one crucial way: They are vague on the specific moves or unrealistic about those moves. In the same way, I might dream of having proven Fermat's last theorem. Both types of case involve dream-like gappiness or irrationality or delusive credulity -- the type of gappiness or irrationality or delusive credulity that might make me see nothing remarkable in my daughter's growing wings or in discovering a new whole number between 5 and 6. Genuine dream doubt might involve doubt about my basic rational capacities, but if so such doubts are additional to simply solipsistic doubt. Whether I am dreaming or not, if I consistently experience specific clever and perceptive chess moves that repeatedly exploit flaws in my own conscious strategizing, flaws that I experience as surprising, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that something exists that surpasses my own conscious intelligence in at least this one area.

Vogon Poetry Contest: Rules

As fans of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy well know, the Vogons are an evil alien race who use their hideous poetry to torture prisoners. But you needn't torture people with bad poetry only in your imagination! You can have a Vogon Poetry Contest here in real life.

It absolutely crucial that this contest be live. Bad poetry skimmed over in print is a mere annoyance. True poetic agony requires more -- requires that the bad poetry be declaimed passionately at a live reading, each word milked with slow lingering passion.

Rules of the Game:
* One host, approximately 12 competitors.
* Each competitor receives a pen and a smallish slip of paper.
* Each competitor writes the title of a bad poem at the top of the paper.
* The host collects the papers and redistributes them so that each competitor has a paper with someone else's title.
* At the signal, each competitor has ten minutes to complete a poem. The time limit is strict, and the host may grab the paper from a competitor mid-sentence if necessary to enforce the time limit.
* The content of the poem need not relate to the title.
* The poem must fit on one side of that slip of paper.
* At the end of the ten minutes, the host gathers the papers and shuffles them randomly.
* The host then reads each poem in self-important, dramatic open-mic fashion. (Imitations of William Shatner are welcome.)
* Anything illegible will be read as nonsense.
* Any stage directions to the host (e.g., "pause here") will be read aloud.
* For each poem, the host will note the volume and the sincerity of the groans of agony, both during the reading of the lines and after the completion of each poem.
* The poem that rates highest on the "groanmeter", in the judgment of the host, wins.
* If necessary, the worst poems will be read a second time in a runoff.

Saturday, I hosted the Third Annual Vogon Poetry Contest at my parents' house in Thousand Oaks. My son, defending champion from the previous year, was the repeat winner, I'm proud to say!

I would share his poem if I thought the goons from the American Poetry Association wouldn't break my legs for the harm done to their favorite art form.

Confessions of a Boltzmann Brain

If the universe is infinite, either in space or time, or if there is an infinite number of finite universes, or if there is even one actually existing infinite universe sufficiently like our own, then any event of finite probability will occur an infinite number of times (given certain assumptions about cosmic diversity). The spontaneous congealment of a brain from relatively disorganized matter, by sheer quantum or statistical-mechanical chance, is often held to have a very tiny but finite probability. Following recent tradition, we can call this entity a Boltzmann brain.

If the universe is infinite, then, I might expect there to be an infinite number of Boltzmann brains molecule-for-molecule identical to my own, thinking the same thoughts as I do and having the same feelings as I have. If you think, as most philosophers do these days, that some form of externalism is true, then maybe a lone Boltzmann brain can't have exactly my thoughts. It couldn't think about my wife, for example, since it has never met my wife. No matter: Suppose that there is some minimal section of brain-plus-body-plus-environment that is constitutively necessary for a being to have thoughts qualitatively identical to my own. There will be an infinite number of randomly congealed Boltzmann beings that meet those minimal conditions. For convenience, I'll still call them Boltzmann brains.

Now the fate of a Boltzmann brain is very likely to be different from the fate I envision for myself. The odds of simply a brain randomly congealing while the rest of the surrounding matter stays disorganized are massively higher than the odds of an earth-and-sun system congealing full of durable life and society. Setting aside some concerns about probability with infinite cases, it seems reasonable to conclude that the odds are miniscule that a Boltzmann brain will live more than a few minutes, or maybe hours if a fair chunk of environment is assumed. If only a brain is assumed, then virtually right away things will go wrong: My optic nerves won't be stimulated by well-structured light. I won't feel like I'm breathing. If I'm in a churning soup, my brain will start tearing apart. If I'm in a near-vacuum, my brain will do whatever unpleasant thing brains do in near-vacuums. If some environment is assumed, right away it will start to crumble. The oxygen will start to dissipate into space, or gray goo will start to ooze through the walls.

Should I worry that I might be a Boltzmann brain? The odds seem rather hard to assess. By stipulation, the Boltzmann brain differs from the me that I would prefer to think I am, as of right now, not at all in quality of experience, including apparent memories.

The subjective probability judgment seems to depend, first, on the odds that the universe is infinite in the relevant sense. It seems reasonable enough, and common enough among cosmologists (if I'm right that cosmologists exist) to think the universe might be infinite. So let's call it 50-50, for all I can tell. Given the non-trivial possibility of an infinite universe, the issue then seems to turn on the odds that this sort of qualitative experience that I'm having right now (and whatever else is in the relevant, non-question-begging evidence base?) would arise from a non-Boltzmannian process of cosmological formation with an earth and sun, human society, and biological birth, as opposed to arising through Boltzmannian chance. How confidently can I assess those odds? Maybe one way to think of it is this: Given some arbitrary huge-huge-huge but not infinite chunk of the infinite universe, what should I expect the ratio to be of beings qualitatively identical to me that arise through normal cosmological Big-Bang-to-now processes as opposed to Boltzmannian chance? Hm! It doesn't seem to me that I really can in good conscience justifiably say that I know that the ratio whoppingly favors the me I think I am. How many Eric-Schwitzgeblian lives will there be in in that huge-huge-huge arbitrary chunk as opposed to Eric-Schwitzgeblian Boltzmann brains? I really have no idea! I'm tempted again, to call it even odds for all I can tell, but maybe it's better to say I just don't know. It seems, then, that I can't dismiss the possibility that I am a Boltzmann brain.

Sometimes I think about this when I wake in the middle of the night or when I'm driving down the freeway and my mind is wandering. Or at least I am now experiencing apparent memories of that sort.

[slightly revised July 31]

Chinese Philosophy Discussion Arcs

Different classical Chinese philosophers have drawn different amounts of discussion in the Anglophone world over the past seventy years.  I want to look at this phenomenon quantitatively and then suggest a general conjecture about the history of philosophy.

The six target philosophers include two who are well-known in the Western world outside scholarly circles, Confucius and Laozi (aka Lao Tzu), and four who are much less well known, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, and Mozi (aka Mengzi, Chuang Tzu, Hsün Tzu, and Mo Tzu).  Below is a graph of their "discussion arcs" -- that is, the rates, times 1000, at which their names appear in keyword (including abstract and title) searches in Philosopher's Index, divided by a representative universe of articles. Click the image for a clearer view.

(For more details on discussion arcs, see here and here. My search terms also included many less common early spellings such as Mocius and Chuangtze.)

One result that jumps out is (as one might expect) the relative prominence of Confucius. Also striking, though, on closer inspection, is another phenomenon: The relative decline of Confucius and Laozi compared to the other four philosophers. To better display this trend, here's a comparison of the proportion of articles mentioning Confucius or Laozi to the proportion mentioning any of the other four. (Again, click for clarity.)

I don't interpret as meaningful the apparently very tight match of the lines at the end of the graph -- but the approximate match does seem meaningful. In the 1940s-1970s, Confucius and Laozi combined received about twice as much discussion as the other four philosophers combined. Starting in the 1980s or 1990s, that situation changed.

My general conjecture is this: As a subfield in the history of philosophy matures (as I believe the history of Chinese philosophy has done in the past couple decades), proportionately less expository attention is devoted to the most famous headline figures and proportionately more attention is devoted to less well known figures. This is a kind of "winnowing of the greats" in reverse.

If that conjecture is correct, we ought to see the same effect in other subareas of the history of philosophy.

"Propositional Attitudes": Belief vs. Desire Grudge Match

If contemporary analytic philosophers are to believed, "propositional attitudes" are a central feature of mentality, perhaps the central feature. What is a propositional attitude? It is a mental state like belief, desire, intention, hope, fear, etc., that can take a full proposition -- speaking loosely, a sentence -- as its complement. I can believe that grass is green. I can desire that we eat cookies. I can hope that aliens will rescue us soon. The mainstream view is that human action arises from the confluence of our beliefs, desires, intentions, and other attitudes.

Now there's a funny thing about how philosophers discuss propositional attitudes. When we list the canonical propositional attitudes we always seem to list belief first. Why is that? Is belief more propositional or more psychologically important an attitude than desire or intention? Not according to conventional wisdom. Also, desire always seems to be listed second. After that, it's a grab bag.

This is not just a quirk of conventional linguistic ordering. Philosophers studying propositional attitudes also typically analyze belief first and most centrally, desire secondarily if at all, and other attitudes only haphazardly. The literature in philosophy of language on "propositional attitude reports" (i.e., sentences like "Lois believes Superman is strong") is especially striking in almost always using only belief examples. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Propositional Attitude Reports might be typical. A search within the page yields 183 hits for "belief", 169 hits for "believe", and 2 hits for "desire". The two occurrences of "desire" are not examples of desire reports, but rather gestures toward an interest in propositional attitude reports generally, including desire.

This monomaniacal focus on belief despite an advertised general interest in propositional attitudes seems, on the face of it, likely to be distortive. Things might go differently, in some ways, for belief than for other propositional attitudes. It's risky to generalize from a narrow range of cases, especially if other people in your subfield are also generalizing from the same narrow range.

I thought it might be fun to quantify this "belief first" distortion. So I set up a grudge match between belief and desire in philosophical work on propositional attitudes. Belief enters, of course, as the heavy favorite.

Here's what I did. I downloaded all the entries in Philosopher's Index that included "propositional attitude*" in a keyword/title/abstract search. Within those entries, I looked for appearances of "belief*", "believe*", and "desire*". (I needed only one search term for "desire*" since same word serves as both verb and noun; the asterisk is a truncation symbol.) If both "belief*"/"believe*" and "desire*" appeared in the same entry, I recorded which term appeared first.

Here are the results. The total number of "propositional attitude" entries was 616. Of these, 382 contained neither "belief*"/"believe*" nor "desire*" in the keywords/title/abstract. (Most of these will presumably discuss belief and/or desire in the body, but the abstract is framed more, shall we say, abstractly.) Of the 234 entries that mentioned either belief or desire, 182 (78%) only mentioned belief, 13 (6%) only mentioned desire, and 39 (17%) mentioned both belief and desire. Among the 39 mentioning both belief and desire, belief appeared first in all 39 cases.

Final score: belief 221, desire 13. Belief wins, with blood on the moon! Tim Schroeder, time to get back to work!

Discussion Arcs of APA Presidents from the 1970s

One of the highest forms of recognition a philosopher in the U.S. can receive is the presidency of an APA division. Lists of the APA divisional presidencies thus provide information, not filtered through current lenses, of people who were regarded as prominent philosophers in their day.

If, like me, you have a kind of morbid curiosity about the fleetingness of academic fame, you might wonder what becomes of these divisional presidents. Lists from the 1930s and 1940s are almost entirely names I don't recognize: Albert Perly Brogan? Marten ten Hoor?

In several past posts, I have used the concept of a "discussion arc". A discussion arc for a topic or a philosopher is simply the number of times the topic or philosopher appears in a keyword search (including title and abstract) in the Philosopher's Index, divided by some representative number of the universe of articles. Some topics and philosophers have fairly steady rates of discussion over the decades (dualism, Kant); others show sharp temporal peaks (ordinary language, Chisholm). I have found that, in general, twentieth century Anglophone philosophers' discussion arcs tend to peak at around age 55-70.

The three divisions (Eastern, Central, Pacific) had a total of 30 presidents in the years ending 1970-1979. I excluded from analysis nine presidents with last names generating too many false positives in keyword searches.[note 1] Of the 21 remaining presidents, six achieved discussion rates of over five per thousand articles (from a representative universe of articles [note 2]). For analysis, discussion is broken into five-year chunks. Click for a clearer view of the figure below:

Around 1975, most of this group had similar discussion rates (though John Rawls rather more). Most arcs show the typical hump shape with peaks at around ages 55-70. The declines of Jaakko Hintikka and especially Norman Malcolm (both of whom peaked a bit young) are notably more severe than the others.  Rawls and Wilfrid Sellars show bimodal distributions, with the typical late-career peak followed by a more recent resurgence.

A second group of five philosophers had peak discussion rates between 1.5 and 5 per thousand (again click for clarity):

Although the data are noisier, as one might expect with fewer data points, all five show the typical hump-shaped arc, though Stuart Hampshire peaks a bit earlier than typical and Alan Gewirth a bit later. Paul Grice appears to have had considerably more staying power than the others, though his recent discussion rate of about 1.5 remains lower than all in the first group except Hintikka and Malcolm.

Four more 1970s APA divisional presidents, while peaking below 1.5, still continue to draw a bit of discussion, with William Alston and Patrick Suppes recently exceeding all in the mid-tier group except Grice.

Finally, there's a group of six who together have drawn only three keyword hits since the year 2000:

Could we have predicted these results in the 1970s? Yes! If we average the discussion arcs of the four tier groups, the overall trend is clear: The much-discussed remained much discussed, the less discussed remain less discussed:

In fact, the decline is much less sharp, on a percentage basis, for the Tier 1's than for the lower tiers, which might be partly explained by my hypothesis about the Winnowing of Greats.

The spread also seems to be clearly evident by the early 1960s, when these philosophers were in their early 40s to early 50s -- maybe even earlier. We can to a substantial extent predict discussion rates in the 2000s, among APA division presidents from the 1970s, based on those presidents' discussion rates in the five-year span during which they turned 45. If we rank their age-mid-40s discussion rates and also rank their discussion rates since 2000, the ranks correlate at r = .59 (p = .006). Nine of the 21 are ranked very near their age-mid-40's discussion ranks (within 2) and 13 are within 4. The biggest outliers are Malcolm (fell from 2 to 12), Donald Davidson (rose from 12 to 2), and Grice (rose from 14 to 5).

Notes:
1. William Thomas Jones, John Wisdom, Lewis White Beck, Alonzo Church, William Henry Hay, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Kurt Baier, Wesley Charles Salmon, and William Craig.  Also: I hand-culled false positives in any five-year period in which the target philosopher generated 40 or fewer keyword hits on a truncation-symbol appended version of his last name (e.g., Lazerowitz*); for those with 40 or more keyword hits, I spot-checked for problematic patterns.

2. Search term: KW=ethic* or KW=moral* or KW=politic* or KW=language* or KW=epistem* or KW=mind* or KW= metaphys*.

Deflating the Moral Thermostat

Ethics professors don't appear to behave any better than do non-ethicists. (See here for my most recent work on this topic, collaborative with Josh Rust.) On what I've been calling the "inert discovery" model of philosophical moral reflection, moral reflection nonetheless still tends to lead to the discovery of moral truths.  It just has no improving effect on one's personal behavior.  So, for example, philosophical moral reflection might lead one to think that eating meat is morally bad (which indeed a majority of ethicists do seem to think), but without any material effects on one's cheeseburger consumption rate (as my studies also seem to show).

Now, on the face of it, the inert discovery model has seemed to me empirically somewhat unlikely.  If one discovers that something is morally bad, shouldn't that add to one's motivations not to do it? And shouldn't one then, on average, do it a bit less?  Shouldn't coming to believe that eating meat is morally bad slightly reduce, at least on average, one's cheeseburger consumption rate?

Here's one possible way, though, to make the inert discovery model work. Plausibly, most people do not -- despite the classic Dixieland song -- actually wish to number among the saints. Instead, maybe, most people have what we might think of as a moral thermostat. We want to be about as morally good as our neighbors, or maybe (in our perhaps somewhat deluded self-conception) somewhat better, or at least not among the first-class jerks.  (Different people might have different thermostat settings.) If we do have moral thermostats, that would explain the moral licensing effect -- the tendency to be more likely to do something a little morally bad after having done something a little morally good. Once you have met or exceeded your target level of moral goodness, you can then better justify getting away with some small violation. And to a large extent, for most people, this moral thermostat might be comparative: If other people are cheating, it is easier to justify allowing yourself to also cheat than if no one else is cheating. Who wants to be the sucker saint?

So maybe, then, if an ethicist who comes to accept high moral standards against eating meat, and in favor of donating large amounts of money to famine relief, etc., does not adjust her moral thermostat relative to others, her behavior will not change despite the moral discovery. She wants, say, to be morally better than 80% of those around her. And even before discovering the badness of eating meat, she conceptualized herself that way. Now, if she ceases eating meat while others do not, she will be (in her own conception) better than, say, 85% of others -- heading too far toward sucker-saint territory for her own tastes.

Thus, the result of an ethicist's accepting high moral standards would be not an improvement in personal behavior but rather the adoption of the view that both she and other people are morally worse, by absolute standards, than she had previously thought.

New Paper in Draft: If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious

Regular readers will have noticed over the past year a so a variety of posts on group consciousness.  I have finally synthesized my thoughts into a full-length paper draft, which I have posted online here.

Here's the core argument: There seems to be no principled reason to deny entityhood to spatially distributed but informationally integrated beings (such as Martian Smartspiders or Betelgeusian beeheads). The United States can be considered as a concrete, spatially distributed but informationally integrated entity. Considered as such, the United States is at least a candidate for the literal possession of real psychological states, including consciousness. The question, then, is whether it meets plausible materialistic criteria for consciousness. My suggestion is that if those criteria are liberal enough to include both small mammals and alien species that exhibit sophisticated linguistic behavior, then the United States probably does meet those criteria. The United States is massively informationally interconnected and responds in sophisticated, goal-directed ways to its surroundings. Its internal representational states are functionally responsive to its environment and not randomly formed or assigned artificially from outside by the acts of an external user. And the United States exhibits complex linguistic behavior, including issuing self-reports and self-critiques that reveal a highly-developed ability to monitor its evolving internal and external conditions.

I leave it open whether we should (a.) do modus ponens and accept the conclusion, (b.) do modus tollens and deny the antecedent, (c.) see this as a challenge to find a good justification for accepting the antecedent while denying the consequent, or (d.) see this exercise as supporting skepticism about a certain style of metaphysics.

As always, thoughts and comments welcome.

Chinese Room Persona

I just came across this passage in Karl Schroeder's science fiction novel Sun of Suns (from a conversation between high-tech engineer Aubri Mallahan and low-tech Admiral Chaison Fanning):

"Max is a Chinese Room persona, which makes him as real as you or I." She saw his uncomprehending stare, and said, "There are many game-churches where the members of the congregation each take on the role of one component of a theoretical person's nervous system -- I might be the vagus nerve, or some tiny neuron buried in the amygdala. My responsibility during my shift is to tap out my assigned rhythm on a networked finger-drum, depending on what rhythms and sounds are transmitted to me by my neural neighbors, who could be on the other side of the planet for all I--" She saw that his expression hadn't changed. "Anyway, all of the actions of all the congregation make a one-to-one model of a complete nervous system... a human brain, usually, though there are dog and cat churches, and even attempts at constructing trans-human godly beings. The signals all converge and are integrated in an artificial body.  Max's body looks odd to you because his church is a manga church, not a human one, but there's people walking around on the street you'd never know were church-made."

Chaison shook his head. "So this Thrace is... a fake person?"

Aubri looked horrified. "Listen, Admiral, you must never say such a thing! He's real. Of course he's real. And you have to understand, the game-churches are as incredibly important part of our culture. They're an attempt to answer the ultimate questions: what is a person? Where does the soul lie? What is our responsibility to other people? You're not just tapping on a drum, you're helping to give rise to the moment-by-moment consciousness of a real person.... To let down that responsibility could literally be murder.

Although John Searle would likely disagree with Aubri's perspective on the Chinese room, I'm inclined to think that on general materialist principles there's no good reason to regard such details of implementation as sufficient to differentiate beings who really have consciousness from those who don't. We don't want to be neurochauvinists after all, do we?

New Data on The Generosity of Philosophy Students

In 2007, I analyzed data on student charitable giving at University of Zurich, broken down by major.  When paying registration fees, students at Zurich could choose to give to one or both of two charities (one for foreign students, one for needy students). Among large majors, philosophy students proved the most charitable of all majors. However, philosophy majors' rates of charitable giving didn't rise over the course of their education, suggesting that their giving rates were not influenced by their undergraduate training.

I now have some similar data from University of Washington, thanks to Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose.  At UW from 1999-2002, when students registered for courses, they had the opportunity to donate to two charities: WashPIRG (a broadly left-leaning activist group) and (starting in fall 2000) "Affordable Tuition Now" (an advocacy group for reducing the costs of higher education in Washington). Bauman and Rose published an analysis of economics students' charity and they kindly shared their raw data with me for reanalysis. My analysis focuses on undergraduates under age 30.

First, looking major-by-major (based on final declared primary major at the end of the study period), we see that philosophy students are near the top. The main dependent measure is, in any given term, what percentage of students in the major gave to at least one of the two charities. Among majors with at least 1000 student enrollment terms, the five most charitable majors were:

Major: percent giving
Comparative History of Ideas: 31%
International Studies: 24%
Philosophy: 24%
Physics: 22%
Anthropology: 20%

The five least charitable were:

Construction Management: 7%
Business Administration: 7%
Sociology: 7%
Economics: 8%
Accounting: 9%

These numbers compare with a 14% donation rate overall.

As reported by Bauman and Rose and also in Frey and Meier 2003 (the original source of my Zurich data), business and economics majors are among the least charitable. The surprise here (to me) is sociology. In the Zurich data, sociology majors are among the most charitable. (Hypotheses welcome.)

But what is the time course of donation? Bauman and Rose and Frey and Meier found that business and economics students were among the least charitable from the very beginning of their education and their charity rates did not decline further. Thus, they suggest, their low rates of charity are a selection effect -- an effect of who tends to choose such majors -- rather than a result of college-level economics instruction. My analysis of the Zurich data suggests the converse for philosophers: Their high rates of charity reflect a fact about who chooses philosophy rather than the power of philosophical instruction.

So here are the charity rates for non-philosophers, by year of schooling:

First year: 15%
Second year: 15%
Third year: 14%
Fourth year: 13%

And for philosophers (looking at 1172 student semesters total):

First year: 26%
Second year: 27%
Third year: 21%
Fourth year: 24%

So it looks like philosophers' donation rates are flat to declining, not increasing. Given the moderate-sized data set, the slight decline from 1st and 2nd to 3rd and 4th years is not statistically significant (though given the almost 70,000 data points the smaller decline among non-philosophers is statistically significant).

One reaction some people have had to my work with Josh Rust on the moral behavior of ethics professors (e.g., here and here) is this: Although some professional training in the humanities is morally improving, one reaches a ceiling in one's undergraduate education after which further training isn't morally improving -- and philosophers, or humanities professors, or professors in general, have pretty much all hit that ceiling. That ceiling effect, the objection goes, rather than the failure of ethics courses to alter real-world behavior, explains Josh's and my finding that ethicists behave on average no better than do other types of professors. (Eddy Nahmias might suggest something like this in his critical commentary on one of Josh's and my papers next week at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.)

I don't pretend that this is compelling evidence against that position. But it does seem to be a wee bit of evidence against that position.

Moral Order and Happiness in Fiction

Imagine this change to Macbeth: Macbeth kills King Duncan and some other inconvenient people, he feels briefly anxious and guilty, and then he gets over it.  Macduff finds out, comes after Macbeth, and Macduff and his family are killed.  Macbeth lives happily ever after.  In a final soliloquy, perhaps, Macbeth expresses satisfaction with his decision to kill Duncan and with how his life has gone.

What would the message of such a play be?

It's hard to imagine Shakespeare writing such a play.  Even if in real life evil sometimes prospers and the perpetrators feel no regret, in fiction evil cannot in the end prosper -- not unless the work is a very dark one.  (Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors comes to mind.)  In reality, I think, evil sometimes prospers and sometimes fails, but somehow this nuanced attitude is difficult to bring across in any but the most subtle fiction.  We are, perhaps, prepared from early childhood to expect fictional wrongdoers to suffer by the end, so when they don't, it's jarring enough to suggest that the writer embraces a dark vision of the world.

Similarly, when the protagonist makes a difficult moral choice and then suffers as a result, we read the work as suggesting that the protagonist made the wrong choice.  But why is that?  In real life, sometimes we make the right choice and suffer.  Here I think of the Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan.  The platoon captures a German soldier and after much debate decides to set him free out of mercy rather than execute him.  Later that same German solider returns to kill one of the group that freed him.  The audience, I think, is invited to conclude that setting him free had therefore been the wrong decision.  Watching the film, it's hard to avoid feeling that!  But might it instead have been the right decision that happened to have a bad consequence?

Here's what I'd like to see -- what I can't recall ever seeing (though I welcome suggestions! [update Jun. 14: in light of further suggestions and reflection, I think I overstated this point yesterday]) -- a work of fiction in which the protagonist makes the morally right decision, and suffers in consequence with neither an outward triumph in the end nor even a secret inner victory of the soul, no sweet comfort in knowing that the right choice was made.  I want a work that advises us: Be a good guy and lose.  Even if evil triumphs, even if the wicked thrive and the upright protagonist collapses in misery, even if the protagonist would have been much happier choosing evil, still he or she was right to have chosen the moral path.

Or is it just a fact about fiction that prudiential triumph -- the final happiness of the protagonist -- will inevitably be understood as a kind of endorsement of the character's choices?

Update June 16:
This is one of those posts I would reorganize from scratch if I could. First: I think I overstate the conclusion somewhat.  And second: I don't think I was sufficiently clear about what the conclusion was, even in my own head. Of course there are a number of works in which a morally upright protagonist loses, without even a secret inner victory, and the morally vile opponent thrives without even secret inner suffering. What I think is challenging -- not impossible! -- is to portray that in a way that is neither (a.) some sort of critique of conventional morality, or (b.) dark enough to constitute some sort of critique of what might be thought of as the mainstream moralistic picture of the world. Such an outcome shouldn't have to be dark, one might think. Sometimes good guys lose and bad guys thrive in in a relatively upbeat understanding of the real world (anything short of pollyannaish), so it should be possible to portray it in fiction without committing to it as typical.  But maybe the darkness flows from the symbolic function of fiction as presenting the moral order, or lack of it, within the fiction as somehow representative of how things generally are...?

(The Book of Job is an interesting case, as pointed out in one comment.)

Where Do We Go from Here? Some Final Thoughts

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

I've discussed growing public anger and confusion about science, and the role of scientists, the popular science press, and philosophers who may all contribute to or fail to alleviate this confusion in different ways. I'll end my guest stint with a big "thank you" to Eric and the readers of his blog, and a few concluding ruminations.

There have already been calls for greater attention to miscommunication between "the folk" and scientists. In a 2010 article on neuroscience communication and the need to address public concerns, Illes et al. recommend a cultural shift among neuroscientists (including more openness regarding the potentials and limitations of the research), the development of neuroscience communication specialists, and additional empirical research on science communication. And at least one neuroscientist is being openly critical about the field online with the Neuroskeptic blog. However, there's also reason to think even these steps will not suffice to end miscommunication.

In a recent New Books in Philosophy interview about In Praise of Reason, Michael Lynch provides an interesting interpretation of data from a 2007 Gallup poll on American beliefs about evolution. According to the poll, the majority of Americans don’t believe in evolution.  But why don’t they?  Only 14 percent cited lack of evidence for evolution as the reason for their disbelief. That is, most agree there is overwhelming scientific agreement on evolution. Although the persistent lack of belief in the face of this evidence is often blamed on lack of scientific education, psychological factors, and so on, Lynch suggests an alternative (which is compatible with there being several factors): many Americans are implicitly skeptical about the methods and practices associated with science, and are not at all convinced that these methods are reliable when it comes to things that matter.

If so, the miscommunication problem is not just a matter of misleading uses of words and a lack of vigorous critical scrutiny of science by professional skeptics. These factors may just exacerbate prior widespread public skepticism about science and its methods of getting at truth when the truths are more complex than science is well-equipped to handle. Such skepticism needn't be an expression of religious conviction or the brute denial of empirical data, but of inchoate doubt that the simplifications required by the scientific method to generate empirical data will ever do justice to real phenomena. From this perspective, the public has good reason to be pissed off when scientists fail to treat it with respect: What make them think their method is so keen and wonderful when it comes to understanding real humans? The question is a propos, because we're living a moment in which science urges replacing our old vision in which we are not machines with a new vision in which we are. Ah, but everything, the public might say, hangs on the word "machine". As a professional skeptic, I'm inclined to agree.

Why Tononi Should Allow That Conscious Entities Can Have Conscious Parts

On March 23, I argued that eminent theorist of consciousness Giulio Tononi should embrace the view that the United States is conscious -- that is, literally possessed of a stream of phenomenal, subjective experience of its own, above and beyond the experiences of all its citizens and residents considered individually. My argument drew on Tononi's work from 2004 through 2009 arguing that any system in which information is integrated -- that is, virtually any causal system at all! -- is conscious. Tononi's one caveat in those works is that to count as a "system" in the relevant sense, an informational network must not be merely a subsystem within a more tightly integrated larger system. I argued that since the U.S. is a system in Tononi's sense, either it or some more tightly integrated larger system (the whole Earth?) must be conscious by Tononi's lights. While in other posts I had to do some work to show how I thought Daniel Dennett's, Fred Dretske's, and Nicholas Humphrey's views implied group consciousness, Tononi seemed an easy case.

However, my March interpretation of Tononi was out of date.  More recently, (here [in note 9] and here [HT Scott Bakker and Luis Favela]), Tononi has endorsed what I will call an anti-nesting principle: A conscious entity cannot contain another conscious entity as a part. Tononi suggests that whenever one information-integrated system is nested in another, consciousness will exist only in the system with this highest degree of informational integration.

Tononi defends this principle by appeal to Occam's razor, with intuitive support from the apparent absurdity of supposing that a third group consciousness could emerge from two people talking. But it’s unclear why Tononi should put much weight on the intuitive resistance to group consciousness, given his near panpsychism. He thinks photodiodes and OR-gates have a little bit of conscious experience; so why not some such low-level consciousness from the group too? And Occam’s razor is a tricky implement: Although admitting the existence of unnecessary entities seems like a bad idea, what is an “entity” and what is “unnecessary” is often unclear, especially in part-whole cases. Is a hydrogen atom an unnecessary entity once one admits the proton and electron into one’s ontology? What makes it necessary, or not, to admit the existence of consciousness in the first place? It is obscure why the necessity of admitting consciousness in a large system should turn on whether it is also necessary to admit conscious experience in some of its subparts. (Consider my Betelgeusian beeheads, for example.) Tononi’s anti-nesting principle compromises the elegance of his earlier view.

Tononi's anti-nesting principle has some odd consequences. For example, it implies that if an ultra-tiny conscious organism were somehow to become incorporated into your brain, you would suddenly be rendered nonconscious, despite the fact that all your behavior, including self-reports of consciousness, might remain the same. (See Ned Block's "Troubles with Functionalism".) It also seems to imply that if there were a large enough election, with enough different ballot measures, the resulting informational integration would cause the voters, who can be conceptualized as nodes or node-complexes in a larger informational system, to lose consciousness. Perhaps we are already on the verge of this in California? Also, since “greater than” is a yes-or-no property rather than a matter of degree, there ought on Tononi’s view to be an exact point at which higher-level integration causes our human-level consciousness suddenly to vanish. Don’t add that one more vote!

Tononi's anti-nesting principle seems only to swap one set of counterintuitive implications for another, in the process abandoning general, broadly appealing materialist principles – the sort of principles that suggest that beings broadly similar in their behavior, self-reports, functional sophistication, and evolutionary history should not differ radically with respect to the presence or absence of consciousness.

The Armchair and the Lab Throne

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

I've noted that the popular science press is both accomplice and victim in the miscommunication between god and mortal. But some philosophers too -- the other main class of professional skeptics -- may be in the same boat. Here a failure to be sufficiently skeptical can appear in the guise of burning the despised Armchair in favor of the Lab Throne, a.k.a rejecting intuitions as evidence in favor of empirical data (even though elicited intuitions are empirical data).

It's often hard to know exactly what is being rejected. Sometimes it seems to be the counterexample tennis (e.g. the Gettier-problem cottage industry) in which intuition gets used. Sometimes it seems to be the scope of an intuition-based claim (I am always reminded of the joke in which Tonto says to the Lone Ranger: "What do you mean "we", white man?"). Sometimes it seems to be the use of far-fetched hypothetical scenarios, although trolley problems are pretty far-fetched and what we are to make of the moral judgments (a.k.a. intuitions) they elicit is a lively subject of debate.

However, if burning the Armchair means not using intuitions as evidence, the Lab Throne will go up in flames along with it. Science depends heavily on intuition in the form of reasons that would be offered for background assumptions if such assumptions were made explicit and explicitly questioned. Why is memory cashed out in terms of encoding-storage-retrieval? Well, what else could memory be but a kind of storage? The fact that this intuitively plausible answer is only now being questioned by memory researchers seeking a more dynamical conception underlines how difficult it can be to root out the role of intuition in science.

Another way in which intuition is deeply embedded in science is in judgments about which aspects of a phenomenon (a stimulus, a task, a performance) are essential to its being the kind of phenomenon it is. One such case occurred to me during a recent talk by Stephen Stich, in which he argued that intuitive judgments exhibit wide variability based on apparently irrelevant factors (and so presumably cannot be relied on to track the truth). One example was the so-called Lady Macbeth Effect, in which moral judgments are affected by bodily cleansing. In one study, moral judgments of those who used an alcohol-based cleaning gel were significantly less severe than those of subjects who used a non-cleansing hand cream (Schnall et al. 2008).

But why think cleaning one's hands is irrelevant to moral judgment? Hopefully not because it seems intuitively plausible. My own off-the-cuff reason for doubt stemmed from generalizing from Goldin-Meadow's experiments with gesture and counting. If moral judgments are embodied, changing embodied aspects would be changing relevant features. (I should note Steve was wholly amenable to this interpretation; I also later found a similar view defended by two staff writers for the Association of Psychological Science.)

In this particular case, the moral is that in at least some cases the problem with Armchair intuition is that it is disembodied, not that it is a priori. Moreover, some critics of intuition may simply presuppose a disembodied (Cartesian?) view of intuition. (Why?) In general, the problem with intuition seems to be that different disciplines have different Armchairs, and the Lab Throne is just another style of Armchair -- and philosophers who prefer Lab Throne style should be especially critical of that particular Armchair.

Ruth Barcan Marcus Memorial Celebration

My friends at Yale have asked me to post the following: Students, colleagues, friends and admirers of Ruth are warmly invited to join us for a CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF RUTH BARCAN MARCUS Saturday afternoon, September 29th, 2012 Yale University Campus New Haven, CT Details of venue, time and program will be settled soon, and a more formal announcement will then be distributed.

Betelgeusian Beeheads

On the surface of a planet around Betelgeuse lives a species of animals who look like woolly mammoths but who act very much like human beings. I have gazed into my crystal ball and this is what I see: Tomorrow they visit Earth. They watch our television shows, learn our language, and politely ask permission to tour our lands. It turns out they are sanitary, friendly, excellent conversationalists, and well supplied with rare metals for trade, so they are welcomed across the globe.

The Betelgeusians are quirky in a few ways, however. For example, cognitive activity takes them, on average, about ten times longer to execute. This has no overall effect on their intelligence but it does test the patience of conversational partners unaccustomed to the Betelgeusians' slow pace. The Betelgeusians find some tasks cognitively easy that we find cognitively difficult and vice versa. They are baffled by our difficulty with simple logic problems like the Wason Selection Task, but they are impressed by our skill in integrating auditory and visual information.

Over time, Betelgeusians migrate down from their orbiting ship. Patchy accommodations are made for their size and speed, and they start to attend our schools and join our corporations. Later, they start to run for political office, displaying roughly the same range of political virtues and vices. Although Betelgeusians don't reproduce by coitus, they find some forms of physical contact arousing and have broadly human attitudes toward pair-bonding. Marriage equality is achieved. What a model of interplanetary harmony!

Everyone agrees that Betelgeusians are conscious, of course. In fact, the Betelgeusians have a long and impressive academic tradition in philosophy of mind and introspective psychology.

Why do I call them "beeheads", you're surely wondering? Well, it turns out that when you look inside their heads and humps, you find not neurons but rather tens of millions of squirming insects, each a fraction of a millimeter across. Each insect has a complete set of minute sensory organs and a nervous system of its own (compare mymaridae wasps on Earth). The beeheads' behavior arises from complex patterns of interaction among these individually dumb insects. These mammoth creatures are much-evolved descendants of Betelgeusian bees that evolved in symbiosis with a brainless, living hive. (The hive itself began as a simple, non-living physical structure that over evolutionary history slowly incorporated symbiotic organisms -- as Earthly ant hives sometimes do -- which then merged into a larger whole.) The Betelgeusians' giant heads and humps have, altogether, a hundred times as many neuron-like cells as the human brain has; and the insects' interactions are so informationally efficient that neighboring insects can respond differentially to the behavioral or chemical effects of other insects' individual efferent neural impulses. The process, still, is an order of magnitude slower than our own.

Maybe there are little spatial gaps between the bees. Does it matter? Maybe, in the privacy of their homes, the bees sometimes fly apart and back together, exiting and entering through the mouth. Does it matter? Maybe if the exterior body is too severely injured, the bees recruit a new body from nutrient tanks -- and when they fly off to do this, they do so without too much interruption of cognition, able to report thoughts mid-transfer. They reconvene and say, "Oh it's such a free and airy feeling to be without a body! And yet it's a fearful thing too. It's good to feel again the power of limbs and mouth. May this new body last long and well! Shall we dance, then, love?"

If you accept the consciousness of Betelgeusian beeheeds, you have accepted the first step in my argument that the United States is conscious.

What the Large Print Sayeth the Small Print Denieth

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

In my last post I noted how professional science journals and other peer-reviewed venues coopt folk-psychological terms to report experimental results. Popular science reporters are not introducing these terms as metaphors to describe neuroscience results in laymen's terms; the laymen's terms are right there in the original articles. Nevertheless, it is a common response to blame public misunderstanding of science results either on the popular science press, or on the public's lack of science education, or both.

For example, Racine and colleagues (2005) coined the term "neuro-realism" to label the way popular science coverage of fMRI studies "can make a phenomenon uncritically real, objective or effective in the eyes of the public." One of their examples of neuro-realism is a 2004 report in The Boston Globe: "[B]ecause fMRI investigation shows activation in reward centers when subjects ingest high-fat foods, one reads, 'Fat really does bring pleasure'." But after examining how the term "reward" is used in peer-reviewed neuroscience articles, it is not clear why the Globe reporter is thought to be miscommunicating the science, let alone responsible for the miscommunication.

Similarly, if adding neuro-babble to an excerpt of a psychological explanation makes non-experts rate the explanation more highly (Skolnick Weisberg et al. 2008), shouldn't the response be: "Hey, we're the gods of knowledge about reality! Maybe, just maybe, with great power comes great responsibility -- including responsibility for our language!" The public might well be excused from not being able to distinguish added neuro-babble ("Brain scans indicate that the "curse" happens because of the frontal lobe circuitry known to be involved in self-knowledge") from serious claims in research articles ("Several fMRI studies reported increased prefrontal and parietal activity during lie ... Based on these findings, deception has been conceptualized as inhibition of truth and generation of lie mediated by the prefrontal cortex, with truth being a “routine” response mediated by the posterior structures." (Langleben et al. 2005)

Instead, where popular science reporters may be blameworthy is in their abdication of their role as professional skeptics. In a 2006 analysis of 134 popular science articles on fMRI studies -- appearing in the popular press between 1994-2004 -- Racine and colleagues found that "the vast majority of articles (n = 104, 79 percent) were uncritical in tone, whereas twenty-eight (21 percent) were balanced or critical", and that specialized sources were less critical than general news sources. In short, the ferociously aggressive skepticism to which political stories and figures are routinely subjected by the press is nowhere to be found. The Scientific American spoof may be a sign that this free ride is about to end.

Applying to PhD Programs in Philosophy, Part V: Statement of Purpose

[This is an update of the fifth part of a series published in 2007.  For the full series, see here.]

I've never read a first draft of a statement of purpose (also called a personal statement) that was any good. These things are hard to write, so give yourself plenty of time and seek the feedback of at least two of your letter writers. Plan to rewrite from scratch at least once.

It’s hard to know even what a “Statement of Purpose” is. Your plan is to go to graduate school, get a Ph.D., and become a professor. Duh! Are you supposed to try to convince the committee that you want to become a professor more than the next guy? That philosophy is written in your genes? That you have some profound vision for the transformation of philosophy or philosophy education?

Some Things Not to Do

* Don’t wax poetic. Don’t get corny. Avoid purple prose. “Ever since I was eight, I've pondered the deep questions of life.” Nope. “Philosophy is the queen of disciplines, delving to the heart of all.” Nope. “The Owl of Minerva has sung to me and the sage of Königsberg whispers in my sleep: Not to philosophize is to die.” If you are tempted to write sentences like that last one, please do so in longhand, with golden ink, on expensive stationery which you then burn without telling anyone.

* Don’t turn your statement into a sales pitch. Ignore all advice from friends and acquaintances in the business world. Don’t sell yourself. You don’t want to seem arrogant or grandiose or like a BS-ing huckster. You may still (optionally!) mention a few of your accomplishments, in a dry, factual way, but to be overly enthusiastic about accomplishments that are rather small in the overall scheme of academia is somewhat less professional than you ideally want to seem. If you’re already thinking like a graduate student at a good PhD program, then you won’t be too impressed with yourself for having published in the Kansas State Undergraduate Philosophy Journal (even if that is, in context, a notable achievement). Trust your letter writers. If you’ve armed them properly with a brag sheet, the important accomplishments will come across in your file. Let them do the pitch. Also, don’t say you plan to revolutionize philosophy, reinvigorate X, rediscover Y, finally find the answer to timeless question Z, or even teach in a top-ten department. Do you already know that you will be a more eminent professor than the people on your admissions committee? You’re aiming to be their student, not the next Wittgenstein – or at least that’s how you want to come across. You want to seem modest, humble, straightforward. If necessary, consult David Hume or Benjamin Franklin for inspiration on the advantages of false humility.

* If you are applying to a program in which you are expected to do coursework for a couple years before starting on a dissertation – that is, U.S.-style programs as opposed to British-style programs – then I recommend not taking stands on particular substantive philosophical issues. In the eyes of the admissions committee, you probably aren’t far enough in your philosophical education to be adopting hard philosophical commitments. They want you to come to their program with an open mind. Saying "I would like to defend Davidson's view that genuine belief is limited to language-speaking creatures" comes across a bit too strong. Similarly, "I showed in my honors thesis that Davidson's view...". If only, in philosophy, honors theses ever really showed anything! (“Argued” would be okay.) Better: "My central interests are philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. I am particularly interested in the intersection of the two, for example in Davidson's argument that only language-speaking creatures can have beliefs in the full and proper sense of 'belief'."

* Don’t tell the story of how you came to be interested in philosophy. It’s not really relevant.

What to Write

So how do you fill up that awful, blank-looking page? In April, I solicited sample statements of purpose from successful recent PhD applicants. About a dozen readers kindly sent in their statements and from among these I chose three that I thought were good and also diverse enough to illustrate the range of possibilities. Follow the links below to view the statements.

• Statement A was written by Allison Glasscock, who was admitted to Chicago, Cornell, Penn, Stanford, Toronto, and Yale.
• Statement B was written by a student who prefers to remain anonymous, who was admitted to Berkeley, Missouri, UMass Amherst, Virginia, Wash U. in St. Louis, and Wisconsin.
• Statement C was written by another student who prefers to remain anonymous, who was admitted to Connecticut and Indiana.

At the core of each statement is a cool, professional description of the student’s areas of interest. Notice that all of these descriptions contain enough detail to give a flavor of the student’s interests.  This helps the admissions committee assess the student's likely fit with the teaching strengths of the department.  Each description also displays the student’s knowledge of the areas in question by mentioning issues or figures that would probably not be known to the average undergraduate.  This helps to convey philosophical maturity and preparedness for graduate school.  However, I would not recommend going too far with the technicalities or trying too hard to be cutting edge, lest it become phony desperation or a fog of jargon. These sample statements get the balance about right.

Each of the statements also adds something else, in addition to a description of areas of interest, but it is not really necessary to add anything else. Statement B starts with pretty much the perfect philosophy application joke. (Sorry, now it’s taken!) Statement C concludes with a paragraph describing the applicant’s involvement with his school’s philosophy club. Statement C is topically structured but salted with information about coursework relevant to the applicant’s interests, while Statement B is topically structured and minimalist, and Statement A is autobiographically structured with considerable detail. Any of these approaches is fine, though the topical structure is more common and raises fewer challenges about finding the right tone.

Statement A concludes with a paragraph specifically tailored for Yale. Thus we come to the question of...

Tailoring Statements to Particular Programs

It's not necessary, but you can adjust your statement for individual schools. If there is some particular reason you find a school attractive, there's no harm in mentioning that. Committees think about fit between a student’s interests and the strengths of the department and about what faculty could potentially be advisors. You can help the committee on this issue if you like, though normally it will be obvious from your description of your areas of interest.

For example, if you wish, you can mention 2-3 professors whose work especially interests you. But there are risks here, so be careful. Mentioning particular professors can backfire if you mischaracterize the professors, or if they don't match your areas of stated interest, or if you omit the professor in the department whose interests seem to the committee to be the closest match to your own.

Similarly, you can mention general strengths of the school. But, again, if you do this, be sure to get it right! If someone applies to UCR citing our strength in artificial intelligence, we know the person hasn’t paid attention to what our department is good at. No one here works on AI. But if you want to go to a school that has strengths in both mainstream “analytic” philosophy and 19th-20th century “Continental” philosophy, that’s something we at UCR do think of as a strong point of our program.

I'm not sure I'd recommend changing your stated areas of interest to suit the schools, though I see how that might be strategic. There are two risks in changing your stated areas of interest: One is that if you change them too much, there might be some discord between your statement of purpose and what your letter writers say about you. Another is that large changes might raise questions about your choice of letter writers. If you say your central passion is ancient philosophy, and your only ancient philosophy class was with Prof. Platophile, why hasn’t Prof. Platophile written one of your letters? That’s the type of oddness that might make a committee hesitate about an otherwise strong file.

Some people mention personal reasons for wanting to be in a particular geographical area (near family, etc.). Although this can be good because it can make it seem more likely that you would accept an offer of admission, I'd avoid it since graduating Ph.D.'s generally need to be flexible about location and it might be perceived as indicating that a career in philosophy is not your first priority.

Explaining Weaknesses in Your File

Although hopefully this won't be necessary, a statement of purpose can also be an opportunity to explain weaknesses or oddities in your file -- though letter writers can also do this, often more credibly. For example, if one quarter you did badly because your health was poor, you can mention that fact. If you changed undergraduate institutions (not necessarily a weakness if the second school is the more prestigious), you can briefly explain why. If you don't have a letter from your thesis advisor because he died, you can point that out.

Statements of Personal History

Some schools, like UCR, also allow applicants to submit “statements of personal history”, in which applicants can indicate disadvantages or obstacles they have overcome or otherwise attempt to paint an appealing picture of themselves. The higher-level U.C. system administration encourages such statements, I believe, because although state law prohibits the University of California from favoring applicants on the basis of ethnicity or gender, state law does allow admissions committees to take into account any hardships that applicants have overcome – which can include hardships due to poverty, disability, or other obstacles, including hardships deriving from ethnicity or gender.

Different committee members react rather differently to such statements, I suspect. I find them unhelpful for the most part. And yet I also think that some people do, because of their backgrounds, deserve special consideration. Unless you have a sure hand with tone, though, I would encourage a dry, minimal approach to this part of the application. It’s better to skip it entirely than to concoct a story that looks like special pleading from a rather ordinary complement of hardships. This part of the application also seems to beg for the corniness I warned against above: “Ever since I was eight, I’ve pondered the deep questions of life...”. I see how such corniness is tempting if the only alternative seems to be to leave an important part of the application blank. As a committee member, I usually just skim and forget the statements of personal history, unless something was particularly striking.

For more general thoughts on the influence of ethnicity and gender on committee decisions, see Part VI of this series.

***

For further advice on statements of purpose, see this discussion on Leiter Reports – particularly the discussion between the difference between U.S. and U.K. statements of purpose.

See here for comments on the 2007 version of this post.  You might want to skim through those comments before posting a comment below.

Can a Rat Walk Down "Memory" Lane?

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

In my first post I introduced the issue of rising public anger at science due to the apparently cavalier way in which empirical results affecting issues the folk hold dear -- silly things like human nature and the nature of the universe -- are being disseminated. I'd like to provide examples of the forms this miscommunication can take, which due to my philosophical interests focus on neuroscience (although the Krauss-Albert tussle over the term "nothing" is clearly germane).

Sometimes miscommunication is one-off. While researching the paper described below, I came across a 1956 Scientific American article in which the scientist, reporting his results to the public, credits B.F. Skinner with refining the methods for measuring pleasurable and painful feelings (Olds 1956). I thought this was hilarious (Skinner?!) until I tried to come up with a good explanation for why he would describe Dr. Radical Behaviorist this way, let alone in a news outlet where the audience is not casual and space is not at such a premium. I couldn't, or at least not in a way in which the scientist came out looking good. (Note: this criticism has nothing to do with the brilliance of the research.) Again, while searching for a related cognitive neuroscience article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Comparative Neurology, I was taken aback to find it in a special issue entitled "The Anatomy of the Soul". Were they serious? Were they joking? Which answer is less bad?

But a systematic source of foreseeable public confusion stems from the use of folk psychological terms to report neuroscience results in professional contexts. Such terms are coopted into neuroscience discourse to report results and translational implications and recycled back into public discourse via the popular science press without mention of possible shifts in meaning. In this paper I compared uses of some terms ("reward", "fear", and "memory") in bibliographically linked studies and found that it is at least an open question whether syntactically identical terms taken from the folk mean what they ordinarily mean, or even whether they remain semantically identical across studies and over time. Unless the public is clearly warned not to assume these words mean what they ordinarily do, miscommunication is pretty much guaranteed.

Here's one example. In a 1954 study of brain areas associated with "reward" with rats, "reward" is behaviorally defined as a stimulus associated with increased frequency of response, and electrical stimulation in certain brain areas is "rewarding in the sense that the experimental animal will stimulate itself in these places frequently and regularly for long periods of time if permitted to do so.” (Olds & Milner 1954) By the time of a related 2005 fMRI study on romantic love, human subjects who self-report being madly in love are scanned while passively viewing photographs of their loved ones. The reported result is that areas of the brain associated in earlier studies (including the 1954 rat study) with motivation to acquire a "reward" are among those associated with being in love. But is love "rewarding" the way electrical stimulation of the brain is "rewarding"? Is a photograph passively viewed by a lover a "reward" the way an electrical brain stimulus self-administered with increasing frequency a "reward"? There's certainly self-stimulation to photographs in the vicinity, but my guess is that this sort of "reward" and "rewarding" feeling isn't what subjects felt in the experiment. So while I don't doubt the septum and caudate nucleus are part of a "reward and motivation" system, I'm not at all sure what "reward and motivation" means that would cover all these cases. Of course, the public has no way of figuring out (and should not be expected to) that "reward" and cognates have undergone shifts in meaning since such terms were seized from the public sphere.

On the Epistemic Status of Deathbed Regrets

It's graduation time, so that means it's time to hear about what people do and do not regret on their death beds. Intended lesson: Pursue your dreams! Don't worry about money!

I can find no systematic research about what people on their deathbeds do in fact say that they regret. A PsycInfo database search of "death*" and "regret*" turns up this article as the closest thing. Evidently, what elderly East Germans most regret is having been victimized by war. There's also this inspiring pablum, widely discussed in the popular press.

Let's grant, however, that the commencement truisms have a prima facie plausibility. With their dying breaths, grandparents around the world say, "If only I had pursued my dreams and worried less about money!" Does their dying perspective give them wisdom? Does it matter that it's dying grandparents who are saying this rather than, say, 45-year-old parents or high school counselors or assistant managers at regional banks? The deathbed has rhetorical cache. Does it deserve it?

I'm reminded of the wisdom expressed by Zaphod Beeblebrox IV in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Summoned in a seance, he says that being dead "gives one such a wonderfully uncluttered perspective. Oh-ummm, we have a saying up here: 'life is wasted on the living'."

There's something to that, no doubt. Life is wasted on the living. But here's my worry: The dead and dying are suspiciously safe from the need of having to live by their own advice. If I'm 45 and I say, "Pursue your dreams! Don't worry about money!" I can be held to account for hypocrisy if I don't live that way myself. But am I really going to live that way? Potential victimization by my own advice might help me more vividly appreciate the risks and stress of chucking the day job. Deathbed grandpa might be forgetting those risks and stress in a grandiose, self-flagellating fantasy about the gap between what he was and what he might have been.

A smaller version of this same pattern occurs day by day and week by week: Looking back, I can always fantasize having been more energetic, more productive, having seized each day with more gusto. Great! That would have been better. But seizing every day with inexhaustible gusto is superhuman. I forget, maybe, how superhuman that would be.

Another source of deathbed distortion might be this: To the extent one's achievements are epistemic and risk-avoidant, their costs might be foolishly easy to regret. Due to hindsight bias, opportunities sacrificed and energy spent to prove something (for example, to prove to yourself that you could be successful in business or academia) or to avoid a risk that never materialized (such as the risk of having to depend on substantial financial savings in order not to lose one's home) can seem not to have been worth it: Of course you would have succeeded in business, of course you would have been fine without that extra money in the bank. On your deathbed, you might think you should have known these things all along -- but you shouldn't have. The future is harder to predict than the past.

I prefer the wisdom of 45-year-olds -- the ones in the middle of life, who gaze equally in both directions. Some 45-year-olds also think you should pursue your dreams (within reason) and not worry (too much) about money.

Second Annual "Experiment Month" Initiative

Deadline for submissions June 15th.

The initiative is intended to help philosophers who are interested in running an experiment by pairing them with experts who can help with experimental design, participant recruitment, and statistical analysis.

Here are some of last year's results.

More info here.

Twilight of the (Scientific) Gods?

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

Is it a mere coincidence that the Metropolitan Opera is offering its latest Ring-cycle blitz at about the same time as my stint as an invited guest blogger for Eric? The skeptic in me warns against hasty judgment, yet I think there's an interesting relationship between the two series. Isomorphisms come cheap, but the best things in life are free, so even a cheap isomorphism is worth more than the best things in life.

Before I go on, I'll introduce myself: I'm a philosopher of mind and metaphysician at the University of Iowa, in the state where Herbert Hoover and Captain James T. Kirk are local notables and gay marriage is legal. I'm also a former Associated Press newswoman, hence a professional gadfly twice over. The news story I'm interested in maps Wagner's distinction between ordinary mortals and the gods to our distinction between "the folk" and scientists, who occupy the most powerful intellectual position in our culture. This story (but not Wagner's) is that the folk are getting deeply and inchoately pissed at the scientific gods. In this series of posts, I want to explore this anger and what it means for science, philosophy and the folk.

One unmistakable expression of it came on April 1, 2012, when Scientific American published a spoof of neuroscience claims, carefully labeled as such just in case the joke was not immediately obvious just by reading it: "Neuroscientists: We Don't Really Know What We're Talking About, Either." It began: "NEW YORK—At a surprise April 1 press conference, a panel of neuroscientists confessed that they and most of their colleagues make up half of what they write in research journals and tell reporters." I suspect the editor had inserted a less generous percentage in an earlier draft.

A second came on April 23, 2012, when The Atlantic Monthly included the following paragraph in an interview with Lawrence Krauss that was sparked by the Krauss-Albert affair (a clash of titans worthy of Wagner):

Because the story of modern cosmology has such deep implications for the way that we humans see ourselves and the universe, it must be told correctly and without exaggeration -- in the classroom, in the press and in works of popular science. To see two academics, both versed in theoretical physics, disagreeing so intensely on such a fundamental point is troubling. Not because scientists shouldn't disagree with each other, but because here they're disagreeing about a claim being disseminated to the public as a legitimate scientific discovery. Readers of popular science often assume that what they're reading is backed by a strong consensus.

I'll borrow from The Atlantic to elaborate the issue: Because the story of neuroscience or physics (i.e., science) has such deep implications for the folk, it is important to tell that story to the folk correctly and without exaggeration. And yet it is not being told that way. The Atlantic is troubled because the public is being fed what may or may not be a crock, not because the gods are clashing (which is only to be expected). Scientific American effectively accuses neuroscientists of being full of it -- half the time, but which half? -- and by adding that "either" practically screams that its staff is getting really tired of being played.

Both missives from leaders in the mortal sphere imply that the folk are not being treated as they believe they should be. This is all the more annoying when your offerings -- um, taxpayer dollars -- are rabidly sought by these gods in the form of NSF grants. And so the question arises: how much longer will, or should, this situation go on? What can be done to change it, for the good of the folk and science?

Grounds for Dream Skepticism

In his famous anti-skeptical work, On Certainty, Wittgenstein wants "grounds for doubt". He wants positive reason to accept a radically skeptical hypothesis.

Trudeau obliges. The key panels:

Life going well? Implausibly well? Wake up and smell the latrine, baby!

The same reasoning might apply if things are implausibly hellish.

Such reasoning should apply especially to Wittgenstein himself. I mean, what's the prior probability of that being your life -- impoverished scion of a suicidal Austrian family of immense wealth, arguably the greatest philosopher of your day though unemployed and hardly publishing, etc.? At the time he wrote On Certainty, Wittgenstein should have thought: Surely all this is some weird dreambrain mashup of wish fulfillment and nightmare!

Philosophers at the peak of public fame should all be dream skeptics. QED.

Martian Rabbit Superorganisms, Yeah!

Most philosophers of mind (but not all) believe that rabbits have conscious experiences -- that rabbits are not, as it were, mere machines all dark inside but rather that there's "something it's like" to be a rabbit, that they can have sensory experiences, that they can experience pain, that they have (in contemporary jargon) "phenomenology". After all, rabbits are not so different from us, biologically.  Rabbits might lack language and higher forms of abstract and self-reflective cognition, but few philosophers think that such differences between us and them are sufficient to render rabbits nonconscious.

Most philosophers of mind (but not all) likewise believe that if we were visited by a highly intelligent naturally-evolved alien species -- let's call them "Martians" -- that alien species might possess a radically different biology from us and yet still have conscious experience.  Outwardly, let's suppose, Martians look rather like humans; and also they behave rather like humans, despite their independent evolutionary origins.  They visit us, learn English, and soon integrate into schools and corporations, maybe even marriages.  They write philosophical treatises about consciousness and psychological treatises about their emotions and visual experiences.  We will naturally, and it seems rightly, think of such Martians as genuinely conscious.  Inside, though, they have not human-style neurons but rather complicated hydraulics or optical networks or the like.  To think that such beings would necessarily be nonconscious zombies, simply because their biology is different from ours, seems weirdly chauvinistic in a vast universe in which complex systems, intelligently responsive to their environments, can and do presumably evolve myriad ways.

Okay, so how about Martian rabbits?  Martian rabbits would be both biologically and behaviorally very different from you and me.  But it seems hard to justify excluding them from the consciousness club, if we let in both Earthly rabbits and Martian schoolteachers.  Right?

Ready for a weirder case?  Martian Smartspiders, let's suppose, are just as intelligent and linguistically sophisticated as the Martian bipeds we love so well.  In fact, we couldn't distinguish the two in a Turing Test.  But the Smartspiders are morphologically very different from bipeds.  Smartspiders have a central body that contains basic biological functions, but most of their cognitive processing is distributed among their 1000 legs (which evolved from jellyfish-like propulsion and manipulation tentacles).  Information exchange among these thousand legs is fast, since in the Martian ecosystem peripheral nerves operate not by the slowish chemical-electrical processes we use but rather by shooting light through reflective capillaries (fiber optics), saving precious milliseconds of reaction time.  Thus the 1000 distributed centers of cognitive processing can be as quickly and tightly informationally integrated as are different regions of our own brains -- and the ultimate output is just as smart and linguistic as ours.  If there were such Turing-Test-passing Martian Smartspiders, it seems we ought to let them into the bounds of genuinely conscious organisms, if we're letting in the bipedal Martians and the Martian rabbits.

Suppose Martian Smartspiders evolve so that their legs become detachable, while still capable of movement and control by the organism as a whole.  The detachment can work because the nerve signals are light-based: The Martian just needs to replace directly connective fibers with transducers that can propagate the light signal across the gap from the surface of the limb to the portion of the central body where that limb had previously been attached.  One can see how detachable limbs might be advantageous in hunting and in reaching into narrow spaces.  Detaching a leg should have negligible impact on cognition speed as long as there are suitable transducers on the surface of the leg and on the surface of the main body where it normally attaches, since the information will cross the gap at lightspeed.  If we put the Martian Smartspider in a sensory deprivation room and disable its proprioceptive system, it might not even be able to tell if its legs are attached or not.

So here's the Smartspider.  Its thousand limbs venture out, all under the constant distributed control of the Smartspider -- just as much control and integration as if they were attached.  She's still a conscious organism, though spatially distributed, right?

Now imagine the Smartspider gets dumb.  As dumb as a rabbit.  Evolutionary pressures support a general specieswide reduction in intelligence.  Now we have a Notsosmartspider.  Is there any good reason to think it wouldn't be conscious if the rabbit is conscious?

Finally, let's take these thoughts home to Earth.  The most sophisticated ant colonies (e.g., large leaf cutter colonies) are as intelligent and sophisticated in their behavior as rabbits.  If we're going to reject biological chauvinism and continguism (prejudice against discontiguous entities) on behalf of the Martians, why not reject those prejudices on behalf of Earthly superorganisms too?  Maybe the colony as a whole has a distinctive, unified stream of conscious experience, of roughly mammal-level intelligence, above and beyond the consciousness of the individual ants (if individual ants even do have individual consciousness).

There are potentially important differences between the Notsosmartspider and an ant colony.  Individual ants might not be as tightly informationally integrated as are the pieces of the Notsosmartspider as I've imagined it, and the rules governing their interaction might be fairly simple, despite leading to sophisticated emergent behavior.  But should we regard such differences as decisive?  As a thought experiment, imagine those differences first in the brain of a single Martian biped.

And if ant colonies are conscious, might the United States be conscious too?

[Revised May 5]