Seven Principles of Humane PhD Advising

It's difficult to be a PhD student. One's entire future career prospects depend on (or seem to depend on) one's ability to please and impress one's dissertation advisor. This generates a lot of stress and a weird power dynamic between student and advisor. Also, one needs to build a new life and a new social network in a new town, during a time in life when social support is often crucial. And one probably wants one's dissertation to be the best most wonderful awesome thing one has ever written in one's life, despite never having had any experience writing anything as long and ambitious. Ouch!

In many ways, being a PhD student is a wonderful and amazing thing, but given the above, humane PhD advising is called for -- not harshness or rigidity.

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Here are seven principles to consider, if you are a PhD advisor, or maybe to hope for in a PhD advisor, if you are student.

(1.) Don't take more than a month to return comments on written drafts. We advisors have a lot to do -- the book contract, the grant deadline, the trip to Germany. But it's our responsibility to give our students comments in a timely fashion. Next month will be busy too, and putting it off won't actually reduce the overall load unless you are slow enough to discourage students from showing their work very often (and I don't think that's what we should normally want). Taking three months to return comments risks slowing down your student's progress by a whole semester. The student might not prod you. They might say it's fine, no hurry -- but take that with a grain of salt, given the power relations. Find the time.

(2.) Don't assume that your student wants to be a superstar researcher. If you're supervising PhD students, you probably see the academic world through the lens of research, and you probably esteem other professors in your field mostly in proportion to the strength of their research. It's great if one of your students lands a job at a research university! It's good, but nothing special, if they land a job at a non-research-focused teaching-intensive university. If they end up teaching at a two-year community college, well, that's maybe a disappointment? Of course some students do really want top research jobs and really would be disappointed to teach at a community college. It's kind of in the air, in grad programs, that a research career is the ideal. But not all students want that. Most of world's professors work in teaching-intensive schools rather than powerhouse research universities -- and that's great. I love to hear it when students tell me that they'd rather teach community college than land a job at Harvard. If you assume that all of your students want to be superstar researchers, you contribute to a competitive and high-pressure environment in which teaching careers are devalued, students who don't appear to be on a research-career trajectory are perceived as disappointing, and students may not feel comfortable honestly sharing their non-research career goals with their professors. All of this unfair and disheartening. (Of course, it's terrific when a student aims for a stellar research career and achieves it. I'm just saying don't assume that's what your students want, and don't push those expectations on them.)

(3.) Don't pressure your students to work more quickly. Sure, the university might want to see them finish in five years. But you should be the advocate of your students' interests against the university, rather than vice versa. Life happens. Depression. Writer's block. Parenthood. Second thoughts and half-pursued career changes. Financial trouble. Illness. A rare and exciting opportunity to see Brazil with their sister. The situation is stressful enough for them without their advisor's giving them time pressure too. You might think it's in their interest to work more quickly; and maybe it is. But rather than take a harsh or paternalistic approach, pressuring them to work faster "for their own good", let them decide what pace works for them. With perfect neutrality, help them finish quickly if that's what they want; and let them take their time if that's what they want.

(4.) Remember that your student is already excellent. It is so hard to gain admissions into a good PhD program these days that only excellent students are able to do so. They might not know how to write a dissertation yet, and they won't have as deep an understanding as you do of the research methods and the existing literature in your subfield. But I've yet to meet a PhD student who didn't have the potential to be a terrific scholar and teacher. There's no need for weeding them out or trying to figure out who are the strong vs. the weak ones. Instead, help each of your amazing students more fully realize the excellence they already have.

(5.) Evaluate the work, not the student. Evaluation is the constant duty of a professor. But focus your evaluation on the student's work rather than on the student's ability or overall quality. Excellent scholars sometimes produce mediocre work, especially when they're under pressure or trying something new. No biggie! (Reminder: Your student is under pressure and trying something new.) If a student feels that everything they produce will be evaluated as a sign of their genius or (more likely) lack of genius, the atmosphere will be one of anxiety, pressure, perfectionism, defensiveness, and competitiveness. Eventually, of course, the core parts of the student's dissertation will have to be excellent, but that's at the end of the PhD program. Assuming that your student is a human being, their work along the way will have its ups and downs, and some of it will have to be discarded or will need at lot of revision, especially if they're creative, adventuresome, and open to risk. How are they going to get helpful feedback if they feel that you are so constantly judging them that they dare not show you material unless they feel it's already near perfect?

(6.) A hoop is just a hoop. A class is just a class. A draft is just a draft. Help them move efficiently through requirements (without pressuring them to do so (#3)). The standard should be adequacy rather than exceptional brilliance. If your student feels a need to prove their genius at every step, it should be no surprise if they're stressed out, taking incompletes, prepping far too long for their quals, etc. Since they're already excellent (#4), if you've been a good advisor and if too many uncontrollable life changes haven't happened, their dissertation will be excellent at the end, when it's finished (#5).

(7.) Be ever mindful of the asymmetry of power. The extreme asymmetry can be easy for advisors to forget, especially for those of us who regard ourselves as egalitarians and who like to be on a friendly, first-name basis with our students. What you "lightly" request might be experienced as compulsion. You might casually criticize, or tease, or razz them as you would a peer, but the effects of such casual remarks can be much more devastating, disruptive, or disorienting than you realize. If a full professor says to another full professor working in the same field "that's obviously wrong" or "that's stupid", that might just be an occasion for friendly disagreement; not with a student whose whole career depends on your opinion.

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All of these principles are defeasible, of course. They represent my perspective on being a humane PhD advisor. I might be wrong, and I might be much less humane than I think I am or than I hope to be. (My grad students say they find me to be a good advisor, but given the power dynamics they might feel compelled to say that. Few of us really know, I think, how good we are as advisors.)

One disadvantage of my adherence to (7) above, I suspect, is that I'm less chummy with my students than some other advisors are. Socializing, inviting students to my house, sharing details of our personal lives, etc., feels slightly strange to me given the power dynamic -- is the "friendliness" free or compelled? I feel like I can't know, and that uncertainty keeps me always slightly guarded and formal. I can only hope I'm not too standoffish as a result.

One disadvantage of my adherence to (2) and (5) above, I suspect, is that the stronger students receive from me less of an encouraging vibe of "you're the best, you're going to be a superstar researcher" than they might hope or expect. All my students are excellent and I prefer not to rank them in my mind. Before anointing one as the next research superstar, let's see how the dissertation turns out in the end. Nor do I especially value research excellence over teaching excellence.

When I think back on how warm and friendly and encouraging my father was with his strongest students (not PhD students in his case, but Master's), I somewhat regret my restraint in both of these respects. There is, I suppose, no perfect solution but instead a range of tradeoffs that can reasonably be weighed differently.

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Related:

Against Those Year-End Faculty Meetings to Discuss the Graduate Students (June 17, 2014)

Think of Your Dissertation as Your Longest Work, Not Your Best Work (July 19, 2018).

Studying Ethics Should Influence Your Behavior (But It Doesn't Seem to)

Some academic disciplines have direct relevance to day-to-day life. Studying these disciplines, you might think, would have an influence on one's practical behavior. Studying nutritional health, it seems plausible to suppose, would have an influence of some sort on your food choices. Studying the stock market would likely have an influence on your investment strategies. Studying parenting styles in developmental psychology would have an influence on your parenting decisions. The effects might not be huge: A scholar of nutrition might not be able to entirely sacrifice Twinkies. A scholar of parenting styles might sometimes lose her temper in ways she knows from her research to be counterproductive. But it would be strange if studying such topics had no effect whatsoever -- if there were a perfect isolation between one's research on nutrition, investment, or parenting and one's personal food choices, investments, and approaches to parenting.

[A doctor doing what doctors in fact don't do very much of.]

Other academic topics have tenuous connections at best to practical matters of day-to-day life: studying the first second of the Big Bang, or mereological approaches to objecthood, or tortoise-shell divination in ancient China. Of course, studying such things could have behavioral effects. Maybe immersion in Big Bang cosmology inspires one to a broader, less parochial worldview. But I don't think we should particularly expect that or think something is strange if it doesn't. It's not strange for a cosmologist to be parochial in the same way it would be for an anti-trans-fat health researcher to not attempt to reduce her own trans-fat intake.

Ethics seems clearly to be in the category of academic disciplines that are directly relevant to scholars' day-to-day lives. Not every sub-issue of every sub-specialization of ethics is so, of course. Some ethical questions are highly abstract or concern matters irrelevant to the immediate choices of the scholars' lives; but few ethicists spend all of their energy on issues of that sort. Issues like our obligations to the poor, the ethics of honesty and kindness, animal rights and environmentalism, prejudice, structural injustices in our society, the proper weighing of selfish concerns against the demands of others, the question of how much to abide by laws or directives with which you disagree -- all seem directly relevant to our lives. It would be odd if devoting a substantial part of one's career to thinking about such issues had no influence of any sort on one's day-to-day behavior.

And yet it's not clear to me that studying ethics does have any influence on day-to-day behavior. Across a wide range of studies, my collaborators and I have found no convincing evidence of systematic behavioral differences between ethicists and non-ethicists of similar social background. Also, impressionistically, in my personal interactions with professional ethicists, my sense is that they behave overall similarly to non-ethicists. Furthermore, there's little evidence that university-level ethics classes influence students' behavior either.

Maybe studying ethics does sometimes have a practical effect. It would, in my mind, be stunning if studying ethics never had any influence of any sort on one's behavioral choices! But the effects, if any, are subtle and difficult to detect empirically.

Why this should be so is an underappreciated puzzle.

The easiest answers -- "academic ethics is all abstract and impractical", "ethics is all post-hoc rationalization of what you were going to do anyway", "our immoral desires are so compelling that no amount of rational thought could lead us to act otherwise" -- don't withstand critical scrutiny as fully adequate answers (although each may have some element of truth).

For several of my imperfect attempts to resolve this puzzle, see:

"The Moral Behavior of Ethicists and the Power of Reason" (with Joshua Rust), Advances in Experimental Moral Psychology (ed. H. Sarkissian and J. Wright, 2014).

"Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical Thought" (with Jon Ellis), Moral Inferences (ed. J.F. Bonnefon and B. Tremoliere, 2017).

"Aiming for Moral Mediocrity" (manuscript in draft).

I'm still banging my head against it.

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Is a Blind Person's Consciousness Partly Contained in Her Cane?

Karina Vold spoke interestingly last week at UC Riverside on "vehicle externalism" about consciousness. (Here's some of her published work on the topic.) According to vehicle externalism, the "vehicle" of consciousness -- that is, its actual physical basis -- is not, as many think, the brain, but rather the brain plus some of the world beyond the body. Central to Vold's presentation was the classic example of the blind person and her cane.

Before discussing that example, I want to start (as Vold did) with a well-known argument fom Andy Clark and David Chalmers. Otto is a forgetful fellow, and so he always carries a notepad with him, full of reminders. When he wants to go to the museum, he pulls out his notebook, which reminds him that the museum is on 53rd Street, and then heads that way. Without the notebook, he would be lost. Clark and Chalmers argue that Otto's retrieving information from the notebook is not relevantly functionally different from a less forgetful person's retrieving the same information from memory. Because of this, they argue, it's correct to say that as long as the notebook is reliably in his pocket (even before he consults its contents), Otto knows that the museum is on 53rd Street. Otto's memory, and thus his mind, is not entirely confined within his skull. It extends to the notepad in his pocket.

Vold and some other defenders vehicle externalism (but not Clark and Chalmers) want to say something similar about consciousness. To explain how and why, Vold invokes a blind person with a cane -- let's call her Genesis [name randomly selected].

Genesis skillfully uses her cane to help her move about, swinging and tapping it to detect obstacles, objects, slopes, textures, and materials. A skilled cane user can learn a lot from a tap or two! Her cane is always with her when she walks, and in some sense it feels almost as if it were a part of her body. (You might experience a lesser version of this if you take a pen in your hand and use it to stroke and tap things. Many people report that it feels almost as though they are directly feeling objects via the pen, as opposed to feeling the pen in their fingers and inferring from those sensations what the objects beyond must be like.) Genesis experiences the world via a sensorimotor loop that travels from brain through arm and hand, through cane, then both into the ears and back up through the arm into the brain.

If a brain-based view of consciousness is correct, it is from her brain alone that Genesis's sensory experience arises, with signals up the arm serving only as input to the brain processes supporting consciousness. In contrast, according to vehicle externalism, the cane and arm do not merely provide inputs. Rather, consciousness arises from cane and arm and brain jointly operating as an integrated system. Consciousness does not depend only causally on the input Genesis receives from the stick. Rather the stick itself is a constituent of an extended system that as a whole constitutes or gives rise to consciousness.

The difference between the internalist input view and the vehicle externalist view can be a little hard to fathom. Here, I think the philosophical concept of supervenience can help. But before I get to supervenience, let me stave off one possible error. The vehicle externalist is not merely saying that consciousness feels as though it is located in the cane. Everyone agrees that consciousness can feel as though it's somewhere other than the location of the system that gives rise to the experience. Pain can feel as though it's in your toe even though the material process that directly gives rise to it, on an internalist view, is in the brain rather than the toe. This seems especially clear in the case of phantom limb pain.

A set of properties, properties of Type A, supervenes on another set of properties, properties of Type B, if and only if there is no possible difference in the As without a difference in the Bs. For example, the score of a baseball game supervenes on the number of times each individual player has officially crossed home plate. There is no possible difference in score without some difference in the number of times at least one individual player has crossed home. (The converse is not the case: It is possible for the score to be the same even if some individual runners had scored a different number of runs.)

The core question of vehicle externalism, as I see it, can be expressed in terms of supervenience: Does consciousness supervene on the brain, as the internalist would say? Or is it possible to have different conscious experiences despite having exactly the same brain states? (Not all vehicle externalists need actually be committed to denying the supervenience of consciousness on the brain, but then I worry that their view might collapse into a notational variant of the internalist input view.)

Consider Otto. If you accept vehicle externalism about Otto's memory, then it should be possible to change Otto's memory state without changing his brain state at all. Otto-1 has the notepad in his pocket. Otto-2 has been pickpocketed, though he hasn't noticed it. Assume that Otto-1 and Otto-2 have exactly the same brain states. On Clark and Chalmers's vehicle externalism, Otto-2 no longer remembers where the museum is (and many other things), although Otto-1 does remember. Despite this difference in memory, on Clark and Chalmers's internalist view about consciousness, Otto-1 and Otto-2 will differ not at all in their conscious experiences. Their conscious experiences will only start to diverge when Otto-2 reaches for his missing notebook. Otto's consciousness, but not his memory, supervenes on his brain state.

Now consider Genesis. If a substantive form of vehicle externalism about consciousness is correct, we should be able to concoct a case in which Genesis-1 and Genesis-2 have identical brain states but non-identical conscious experiences. To claim that such a case is possible is just what it is to deny that consciousness supervenes on the brain.

In other words, we want to imagine changing the cane in some important way, without changing the brain. The vehicle externalist ought to say that the conscious experiences will be different. If consciousness is literally partly contained in or constituted by the cane, Genesis-1 and Genesis-2, with identical brains but different canes, ought to have different conscious experiences.

Let's consider a small slice of time -- a third of a second -- when Genesis's cane is swinging through the air between things. Suppose, hypothetically, that a friend were able to undetectably change the tip of the cane just before that third of a second. Genesis is swinging her cane and touches a passerby who "accidentally" jostles the cane a bit. In Genesis-1, the cane is unchanged after the jostling. In Genesis-2, the long tip of her cane has been covertly swapped for a shorter tip of the right weight (slightly heavier, to compensate for the difference in leverage). The swap is so perfect that for the entire third of a second after the bump and before her cane strikes the next object, the signals into their brains are identical. For this brief duration, Genesis-1 and Genesis-2 have identical brain states but different cane states.

[Update: Instead of a clever prankster, it could be a friend who arranges the swap, with Genesis's prior consent but without her knowledge of the time or method of the swap. See the comments section for discussion.]

Shortly, the brain states of Genesis-1 and Genesis-2 will diverge: Genesis-2 will think the next object is closer than it is, and after the strike she might notice some difference in the sound and tactile dynamics of her cane. The question concerns what happens before that next tap of the cane. The canes are different. The sensorimotor contingencies are different (though that difference has not yet resulted in divergent input signal). Will the conscious experiences, already, be different?

It seems unintuitive that they would be. Most of the vehicle externalists about consciousness I have pressed on this question either hesitate to answer, or try to wiggle out in some way. Also, if introspection is something that happens in the brain, and if consciousness is always immediately available for introspection, the case seems to present trouble. Some philosophers might think that if the view implies a not-immediately-introspectible difference in conscious experience, that would be a fatal flaw. But I disagree. Intuitions about consciousness aren't always correct, and simple, immediate-access models of introspection may not be correct. That Genesis-1 and Genesis-2 have different conscious experiences already in that first third of a second is an interesting possibility, worth considering, and it seems to flow naturally from vehicle externalism. If this is a "bullet", I think the vehicle externalist should bite it.

[image by Ken Walton]

Do You Have Whole Herds of Swiftly Forgotten Microbeliefs?

I believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, that I am wearing shoes, and that my daughter is in school right now. That seems unproblematic. But do I believe (assuming I don't stop to explicitly think about it) that my desk chair will swivel to the left, as I push off with my right foot to reach for a book? Driving to campus today, did I believe that the SUV approaching on the crossroad wouldn't blow through the red light? Reaching into my box of Triscuits, do I believe that the inner plastic bag is folded over twice to the left and that I need to unfold it to the right to access the snacks inside, as I absentmindedly, but skillfully enough, do just that?

Many philosophers, following Donald Davidson, hold that when you act intentionally, you must have beliefs about what you are doing -- beliefs that what you are doing will (or at least has a chance of) bringing about the event you want to bring about by doing that thing. Intricacies bloom if you analyze the idea carefully (which is what makes it fun philosophy), but the basic thought is that when I intentionally flip the switch to turn on the light, I want to turn on the light and I believe that by flipping the switch I will do so.

But those types of beliefs are about your actions and their effects -- not about the details of the world that shapes your actions. It would be odd to think that you could intentionally act in the world without a broad range of beliefs about your environment, but it's much less clear how much you have to believe, that is, how fine-grained or detailed your beliefs need to be. If I'm intentionally driving to work, I have to believe that I'm in my car. Maybe I have to believe that this is the route to work (though absent-mindedly driving toward a bridge you know is closed is a problem case for this claim). Probably I have to believe that the light is red, as I stop for it. But do I have to believe that all four wheels of my car are currently touching the road? Do I have to believe that the drivers nearby will stay in their lanes? Do I believe that lightpost that I don't really notice, but certainly see, is right there?

Here are two extreme views:

Restrictive View: I only believe what I explicitly reflect on. Unless the thought "I am on the correct route to work" actually bubbles up to consciousness, I don't really believe that. Unless I specifically attend to the fact that I still have two arms, I don't believe that I do.

Liberal View: I believe everything about the world that my skillful actions depend on. I believe that by shifting my weight such-and-so as I walk, I won't tip over. I believe that my right forefinger now needs to come down a half inch from the Y to hit the H I am about to strike on the keyboard. I believe that this patch of road is not yellow, and this patch, and this patch, for every patch of road that flies past my peripheral vision if it is the case (as it presumably is) that were one of those patches yellow I would steer slightly differently to give it a wider berth.

The Restrictive view seems too restrictive -- at least on the standard Anglophone philosopher's understanding of "belief", according to which, belief is, to a first approximation, synonymous with a certain standard usage of "think" or "thought" -- not the active use ("I am thinking of Triscuits") but a more passive use ("I thought there were Triscuits in the cupboard, honey?"). I can truly say to a colleague "I thought you were coming to the department meeting", i.e., I believed that he was, even if I only assumed that he was coming and I didn't entertain the specific conscious thought "Isaiah will be coming to the meeting". If knowledge of the fact that P requires believing that P, as most philosophers think (other than me, but never mind that!), it seems that we can truly say "I knew you wouldn't let me down" even if the thought that you wouldn't let me down never explicitly came to mind -- perhaps especially if the thought that you wouldn't let me down never explicitly came to mind.

On the other hand, the Liberal view seems too liberal. Normally I can report my beliefs, if you ask, but I cannot report these. (I might not even remember where the Y and the H are relative to each other, if you asked me when I didn't have a keyboard to look at.) Normally, also, our beliefs can broadly inform our reasoning, but these cannot do so. Although our habits and our fine-grained motor skills depend in some way on responsiveness to environmental details, whatever is guiding that responsiveness appears to be isolated to the execution of specific tasks rather that being generally available for cognition.

If what I've said so far is right, the best view is somewhere in the middle, between the Restrictive and the Liberal. But where in the middle? Do we have whole herds of microbeliefs that guide our action -- and which we could report, perhaps, if asked that very split second -- but which are almost all swiftly forgotten? Or are our beliefs more coarse-grained and durable than that -- the big-picture stuff that we are likely to remember for at least a minute or two?

Here's what I think: It's fine to talk either way, within broad limits, as long as you are consistent about it.

What's not fine, I'd suggest, is to commit to there being an ontologically or psychologically real sharp line, such that exactly this much availability and reportability and memory (or whatever), no more, no less, is what's necessary for belief. What's not fine, I'd suggest, is the kind of industrial-grade realism that holds that there is a precise fact of the matter, if only we could know it, that I believe exactly P, Q, and R while I'm driving and not the ever-so-slightly-more-fine-grained T, U, and V.

I hope you find this assertion plausible, reflecting on the range of examples I've given. If not, maybe I can strengthen my case by referring to other classes of phenomena where the boundaries of belief appear to be fuzzy (e.g., here, here, here, and here).

If I am right in denying this sharp line, that fact fits much more comfortably with dispositionalism about belief, which treats believing as a matter of matching, to a sufficient degree, a profile pattern of actions, thoughts, and reactions characteristic of that belief than it fits with a view on which believing requires that you possess discrete representations of P, Q, and R, which are always either discretely stored, or not stored, somewhere in the functional architecture of your mind.

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Related:

Do You Have Infinitely Many Beliefs about the Number of Planets? (Oct 17, 2012)

It's Not Just One Thing, to Believe There's a Gas Station on the Corner (Feb 28, 2018)

In-Between Believing (Philosophical Quarterly, 2001)

A Phenomenal, Dispositional Account of Belief (Nous, 2002).

A Dispositional Approach to the Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box, in Nottelmann, ed., 2013.

And Daniel Dennett's classic Real Patterns (Journal of Philosophy, 1991).

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How to Turn Five Discrete Streams of Consciousness into a Murky Commingling Bog

Here's something you might think you know about consciousness: It's unified and discrete.

When we think about the stream of conscious experience -- the series of conscious thoughts, perceptual experiences, felt emotions, images, etc., that runs through us -- we normally imagine that each person has exactly one such stream. I have my stream, you have yours. Even if we entertain very similar ideas ("the bus is late again!") each of those ideas belongs determinately to each of our streams of experience. We share ideas like we might share a personality trait (each having a full version of each idea or trait), not like we share a brownie (each taking half) or a load (each contributing to the mutual support of a single whole). Our streams of experience may be similar, and we may influence each other, but each stream runs separately without commingling.

Likewise, when we count streams of experience or conscious entities, we stick to whole numbers. It sounds like a joke to say that there are two and a half or 3.72 streams of conscious experience, or conscious entities, here in this room. If you and I are in the room with a snail and an anesthesized patient, there are either two conscious entities in the room with two streams of conscious experience (if neither snails nor people in that type of anesthesized state have conscious experiences), or there are three, or there are four. Even if the anethesized patient is "half-awake", being half-awake (or alternatively, dreaming) is to be fully possessed of a stream of experience -- though maybe a hazy stream with confused ideas. Even if the snail isn't capable of explicit self-representation of itself as a thinker, if there's anything it's like to be a snail, then it has a stream of experience of its own snailish sort, unlike a fern, which (we normally think) has no conscious experiences whatsoever.

I find it hard to imagine how this could be wrong. And yet I think it might be wrong.

To start, let's build a slippery slope. We'll need some science fiction, but nothing too implausible I hope.

At the top of the slope, we have five conscious human beings, or even better (if you'll allow it) five conscious robots. At the bottom of the slope we have a fully merged and unified entity with a single stream of conscious experience. At each step along the way from top to bottom, we integrate the original five entities just a little bit more. If they are humans, we might imagine growing neural connections, one at a time, between their brains, slowly building cross-connections until the final merged brain is as unified as one could wish. If necessary, we could slowly remove and reconfigure neurons during the process so that the final merged brain is exactly like a normal human brain.

Since the human brain is a delicate and bloody thing, it will be much more convenient to do this with robots or AI systems, made of silicon chips or some other digital technology, if we are willing to grant that under some conditions a well-designed robot or AI system could have a genuine stream of consciousness. (As intuitive examples, consider C3P0 from Star Wars or Data from Star Trek.) Such systems could be slowly linked up, with no messy neurosurgery required, and their bodies (if necessary) slowly joined together. On the top of the slope will be five conscious robots, on the bottom one conscious robot.

The tricky bit is in the middle, of course. Either there must be a sudden shift at exactly one point from five streams of experience to one (or four sudden shifts from exactly 5 to 4 to 3 to 2 to 1), as a result of ever so small a change (a single neural connection), or, alternatively, streams of experience must in some cases not be discretely countable.

To help consider which of these two possibilities is the more plausible, let's try some toy examples.

You and me and our friends are discretely different animals with discretely different brains in discretely different skulls, with only one mouth each. So we are used to thinking of the stream of conscious experience like this:

The red circles contain what is in our streams of conscious experience -- sometimes similar (A and A', which you and I share), sometimes different (C belongs only to you), all reportable out of our discrete mouths, and all available for the guidance of consciously chosen actions.

However, it seems to be only a contingent fact about the biology of Earthly animals that we are designed like this. An AI system, or an alien, might be designed more like this:

Imagine here a complex system with a large pool of representations. There are five distinct verbal output centers (mouths), or five distinct loci of conscious action (independent arms), each of which draws on some but not all of the pool of representations. I have included one redundant representation (F) and a pair of contradictory representations (B and -B) to illustrate some of the possible complexity.

In such a case, we might imagine that there are exactly five streams, though they overlap in some important way.

But this is still much simpler than it might be. Now imagine these further complications:

1. There is no fixed number of mouths or arms over time.
2. The region of the representational pool that a mouth or arm can access isn't fixed over time.
3. The region of the representational pool that a mouth or arm can access isn't sharp-boundaried but is instead a probability function, where representations functionally nearer to the mouth or arm are very likely to be accessible for reporting or action, and representations far from the mouth or arm are unlikely to be accessible, with a smooth gradation between.

This picture aims to capture some of the features described:

Think of each color as a functional subsystem. Each color's density outside the oval is that system's likelihood, at any particular time, of being available for speech or action in that direction. Each color's density inside the oval is the likelihood of representations in that region being available to that subsystem for speech or action guidance. With a rainbow of colors, we needn't limit ourselves to a discretely countable number of subsystems. The figure also might fluctuate over time, if the probabilities aren't static.

In at least the fluctuating rainbow case, I submit, countability and discreteness fail. Yet it is a conceivable architecture -- a possible instantiation of an intermediate case along our slippery slope. If such an entity could host consciousness, and if consciousness is closely related to its fluctuating rainbow a structural/functional features, then the entity's stream(s) of conscious experience cannot be effectively represented with whole numbers. (Maybe we could try with multidimensional vectors.)

Is this too wild? Well, it's not inconceivable that octopus consciousness has some features in this direction (if octopi are conscious), given the distribution of their cognition across their arms; or that some overlap occurs in unseparated craniopagus twins joined at the head and brain; or even -- reading Daniel Dennett in a certain way -- that we ourselves are structured not as differently from this as we normally suppose.

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Related:

A Two-Seater Homunculus (Apr 1, 2013);

How to Be a Part of God's Mind (Apr 23, 2014);

If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (Philosophical Studies, 2015);

Are Garden Snails Conscious? Yes, No, or *Gong* (Sep 20, 2018).

I Asked 400 Undergrads to Perform 90 Minutes of Kindness for No Reward. Here's What Happened

Followers of this blog will recall my post from October 30, where I solicited ideas about a "Kindness Assignment" for my lower-division philosophy class "Evil". The assignment was to perform ninety minutes of kindness for one or more people, with no formal accountability or reward. I canceled one day of class to free up time for students to perform their act of kindness. I described the Kindness Assignment as "required", but I told them I would not be checking on or grading them in any way.

Here's the full text of the Kindness Assignment.

During the final exam, I gave students a single detached page, front and back, on which they could write about their experiences with the Kindness Assignment. The page was prominently marked as "optional". I said I would not grade their responses and would only view the responses after final grades were submitted, so that their reports would have no influence of any sort on their grades.

On the page, students could say what they did (if anything), what they learned (if anything), how they felt about the fact that there was no reward or accountability, how they felt about having spent 90 minutes that way, and how their thoughts about the assignment connected to course themes. I also asked students whether they thought I should give the Kindness Assignment again, and if so, what if anything they would recommend changing. Here's the full text of the response sheet.

Three hundred and ninety-eight students took the final exam. Of these, 150 (38%) wrote something on the Kindness Assignment response sheet. It was a long and difficult exam, and since responding was optional and not for credit, some students who completed the Kindness Assignment may not have submitted a response. I assume that many or most of the non-submitters did not complete the assignment. Reviewing the responses, I estimate that 20% of the students who submitted a response said that they did not perform the assignment. Thus, approximately 120 students performed the Kindness Assignment and chose to tell me about their experience.

Understandably, in the context of an exam, only a minority of students took the time to answer all eight questions on the two-page response sheet. Some just gave a brief summary of what they did. Others praised or criticized the assignment without detailing what they did.

Responses to "What, if anything, did you do for the Kindness Assignment?"

Among the approximately 20% who said they didn't complete the Kindness Assignment, a substantial minority said they had planned to do so but forgot or were prevented. Others said that with no reward or accountability, they didn't feel motivated to do it.

Among those who reported completing the assignment, about 25% chose to spend the time helping a friend or family member with chores, about 25% chose to spend the time in a unusually meaningful or thoughtful personal interaction with a family member, about 25% helped strangers with chores or gifts (esp. homeless people or the elderly, sometimes through an organization), and the rest did a variety of other things.

One student bought five extra-large pizzas and shared them with people on Skid Row, which he described as "a really humbling experience.... Seeing people who were down on their luck cry/smile over some warm food really impacted me. Not sure how to succinctly phrase this, but it showed me a good and kind side of humanity that I often have trouble seeing."

Among students who interacted meaningfully with family:

One decided to dedicate the whole weekend to her family and "learned that I needed to re-evaluate my priorities.... I was working and making money... and in a way I was becoming greedy." She concluded "It's sad that it took an assignment... for me to realize this."

Another took her niece, who she usually ignores, out for ice cream, and said she came to appreciate that "little kids... are the nicest types of human beings."

Another student had a long, personal phone call with his stepfather, from whom he normally felt emotionally estranged, and said he finally realized that his stepfather wasn't really a bad person.

Still another "decided on actually listening to my parents about their issues & problems. Each of them had a curious look and asked where all of this had come from. I told them all about the course.... I could even see my dad tearing up while talking. I bet it's from not just having a heart to heart talk in who knows how long but also with his own son for I think the first time."

One student, saying he was inspired by Peter Singer's work on charitable giving gave $5000 (!) to an acquaintance in financial need.

Responses to "What, if anything, did you learn from doing the Kindness Assignment?

Answers to this question varied considerably. Maybe 20% of respondents said they learned nothing. Maybe half of respondents said something about learning how kindness can be pleasurable both for the giver and receiver. Some who had especially moving experiences said that they learned something important about people close to them, or about their own values, or about the kindness of humanity.

Several students said that they learned, from the fact that they didn't complete the assignment, that they weren't much motivated to be kind without the benefit of some further reward.

Responses to "How do you feel about the fact that there is no formal accountability or reward for completing this assignment?"

For this question I coded responses as pro, con, or mixed/ambiguous. Thirty-four out of 78 (44%) of respondents were pro. They offered a variety of justifications, including (a.) having no tangible reward ensures that the kindness is authentic rather than forced; (b.) it allows students who are introverted or otherwise not disposed to do the assignment the opportunity to decline to participate without penalty; and (c.) it led them to think about whether they or other people would really be willing to go out of their way to be kind for ninety minutes without any tangible benefit.

Ten out of 78 (13%) were con. When they offered a reason, it was generally that people wouldn't be sufficiently motivated without reward.

The remainder, also 34/78 (44%), were ambiguous or mixed. Most of these said they "didn't mind" not receiving reward or that it "didn't matter" to them that there was no reward.

Responses to "How do you feel about having spent ninety minutes in this way?"

The majority of respondents reported feeling good about having done the assignment: 53/70 (76%). Only a few felt negative about it: 6/70 (9%). One student, for example, who offered to clean a friend's dorm room ended up feeling taken advantage of, especially after other friends started asking for their rooms to be cleaned too. The remainder were mixed or ambiguous 11/70 (16%).

Unfortunately, the student who gave the $5000 expressed mixed emotions at having given so much, saying that "I can feel my soul feel happy about this" but "looking at my bank account, I am not happy. In fact, close to very sad/depressed." He recommended that in the future I suggest that students not give money.

This student happened to be among the several students in the course I had come to know personally. I emailed him, asking if he's doing okay, and inviting him to discuss his experience further if he wants. After a brief exchange, he consented to my sharing his experience with others, so that others might learn from it.

Singer argues that we should give away all of the money that we would otherwise spend on luxuries. My impression is that few students who read Singer on this topic are convinced by his arguments (I have opinion survey data to support this claim), and that among the few who do decide to give, almost all give well within their means, without regret.

However, once in a rare while, people probably are inspired to radical sacrificial actions by reading the ethics texts that we philosophy professors assign. I tend to forget that this can be a consequence of teaching ethical views like Singer's. Arguably, as a teacher I have partial responsibility for such consequences, perhaps especially for students who are still in their teens.

Responses to "Should the professor give a version of the Kindness Assignment in the future?"

The large majority who responded -- 54 out of 63 (86%) -- answered yes, some with big exclamation marks and high enthusiasm. Only four (6%) answered no and 5 (8%) were mixed or ambiguous.

Recommendations for changes to the assignment.

Many students said the assignment was excellent as-is, but a substantial minority recommended one change or another. The most common recommendations were to offer credit for it (10 students), to clarify better what sorts of kind actions I had in mind (7 students), and to shorten the length of the act of kindness (6 students).

Next time, I probably will better clarify the kind of actions I have in mind -- and I will suggest that students not give money.

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Zhuangzi Might Prefer the Passive Knife to the Skillful Cook

... contra the currently dominant "skill" interpretations of the Zhuangzi.

Among the most famous and striking passages by the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi is the following:

A butcher was cutting up an ox for Lord Wenhui. Wherever his hand touched, wherever his shoulder leaned, wherever his foot stepped, wherever his knee pushed -- with a zip! with a whoosh! -- he handled his chopper with aplomb, and never skipped a beat. He moved in time to the Dance of the Mulberry Forest, and harmonized with the Head of the Line Symphony. Lord Wenhui said, "Ah, excellent, that technique can reach such heights!"

The butcher sheathed his chopper and responded, "What your servant values is the Way, which goes beyond technique. When I first began cutting up oxen, I did not see anything but oxen. Three years later, I couldn't see the whole ox. And now, I encounter them with spirit and don't look with my eyes. Sensible knowledge stops and spiritual desires proceed. I rely on the Heavenly patterns, strike in the big gaps, am guided by the large fissures, and follow what is inherently so. I never touch a ligament or tendon, much less do any heavy wrenching! A good butcher changes his chopper every year because he chips it. An average butcher changes it every month because he breaks it. There are spaces between those joints, and the edge of the blade has no thickness. If you use what has no thickness to go where there is space -- oh! there's plenty of extra room to play about in. That's why after nineteen years the blade of my chopper is still as through fresh from the grindstone.

"Still, when I get to a hard place, I see the difficulty and take breathless care. My gaze settles! My movements slow! I move the chopper slightly, and in a twinkling it's come apart, crumbling to the ground like a clod of earth! I stand holding my chopper and glance all around, dwelling on my accomplishment. Then I clean my chopper and put it away."

Lord Wenhui said, "Excellent! I have heard the words of a butcher and learned how to care for life!"

(Kjellberg trans., Ch. 3).

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Based partly on this passage from the (generally regarded as authentic) Inner Chapters and several related passages from the (more textually dubious) Outer Chapters, it is more or less orthodox to treat the celebration of skillful artisanal or athletic activity as central to Zhuangzi's worldview (e.g. Graham 1991; Hansen 1992; Ivanhoe 1993; Slingerland 2007; Fraser 2014).

However, if we take the Inner Chapters as our guide to the core "Zhuangzi" outlook, a puzzle arises. Nowhere else in the Inner Chapters is artisanal or athletic skill of this sort singled out for praise. Indeed, skill is frequently criticized, or associated with negative outcomes. Zhuangzi celebrates the useless yak in contrast to a weasel or a dog who is skilled at catching rats (the weasel ends up dead in a trap [Ziporyn trans., p. 8] and the dog bound by a leash [p. 51]). His "desk slumping" friend Huizi's logical skill brings him nothing but trouble. Skilled musical practitioners end up quarreling (p. 15), and people who test their skills in contests start bright but end up in dark conniving (p. 28); "skill [is] mere salesmanship" (p. 48); the divine creator or teacher "supports heaven and earth, and carves out all forms, but without being skillful" (p. 49).

If skillful activity, guided by the spirit rather than the eyes, is central to Zhuangzi's values, why doesn't he say so anywhere else in the chapters that form the authentic core of the book? Why doesn't he celebrate the skillful weasel rather than the unskilled yak and the various other seemingly unskilled characters in his stories, such as Horsehead Humpback (p. 35-36)?

The answer, I think, is that Zhuangzi doesn't particularly value skillful artisanal or athletic activity. Celebrating the skill of the butcher in one place and deriding skill in others is an example of Zhuangzian self-contradiction. I have argued (here and here) that Zhuangzi intentionally contradicts himself within and between passages, in his project of undercutting doctrinaire adherence to any set of motivating values.

So how should we interpret the passage of the butcher? How does the butcher's activity teach the king "how to care for life"?

The first thing to notice is that the long-lived thing is not the butcher. It's the knife. After nineteen years, the knife is as sharp as if fresh off the whetstone. In contrast, the butcher is in danger! As Zhuangzi says in Chapter 4 and elsewhere, it is dangerous to display your talents before a king. If you please the king, he might bind you into servitude; if you displease him, he might kill you.

What's good about the knife, or at least what leads to its healthy longevity, is that it simply follows along through empty spaces, rather than hacking and slicing. It lets the butcher's hand lead it, not fighting, not resisting, but also not helping things along. The knife itself has no skills. Due to the butcher's skill, the knife itself needs to do almost no cutting at all.

Going along with things, doing nothing, lounging in the shade, standing useless and quiet, like a yak or an ancient gnarled tree -- that's closer to Zhuangzi's core vision than acting with impressive skill, like an accomplished artisan or athlete.

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For a fuller treatment of these issues see my forthcoming essay, "The Unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and Useless and Not So Good at Catching Rats".

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Writings of 2018

Every year on New Year's Day, I post a retrospect of the past year's writings. Here are the retrospects of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.

This past year, I worked quite a bit on consciousness and Chinese philosophy, also some on AI ethics, moral psychology, belief, and the sociology of philosophy. May 2019 be similarly fruitful!

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Book forthcoming:

Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures (provisional title), MIT Press.

Full-length non-fiction essays appearing in print in 2018:

"The experience of reading" (with Alan T. Moore), Consciousness & Cognition, 62, 57-68.

"Death, self, and oneness in the incomprehensible Zhuangzi", in P.J. Ivanhoe, O. Flanagan, R. Harrison, H. Sarkissian, and E. Schwitzgebel, eds., The Oneness Hypothesis, Columbia University Press.

"The insularity of Anglophone philosophy: Quantitative analyses" (with Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Andrew Higgins, and Ivan Cabrera Gonzalez), Philosophical Papers, 47, 21-48.

Full-length non-fiction essays finished and forthcoming:

"Kant meets cyberpunk", Disputatio.

"The unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and useless and not so good at catching rats", in Karyn Lai and Wai Wai Chiu, eds., Skill and Mastery. London: Roman and Littlefield.

"A new measure of life satisfaction: The Riverside Life Satisfaction Scale" (with Seth Margolis, Daniel J. Ozer, and Sonja Lyubomirsky). Journal of Personality Assessment.

"Designing AI with rights, consciousness, self-respect, and freedom" (with Mara Garza), in S.M. Liao, ed., The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. New York: Oxford.

Shorter non-fiction:

"Consciousness, idealism, and skepticism: Reflections on Jay Garfield’s Engaging Buddhism", Sophia (forthcoming).

"Reply to Hurlburt" (with Alan T. Moore), Consciousness & Cognition, 63, 143-145.

Editing work:

In print in 2018: The Oneness Hypothesis (with P.J. Ivanhoe, O. Flanagan, R. Harrison, and H. Sarkissian), Columbia University Press.

Under contract: Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories, (with Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt). Bloomsbury Press.

Non-fiction essays in draft and circulating:

"Aiming for moral mediocrity"

"The pragmatic metaphysics of belief".

"Is there something it’s like to be a garden snail?"

Science fiction stories:

I didn't publish any new stories this year, though I have a few in draft that I plan to submit in 2019.

Some favorite blog posts:

Imagining yourself in another's shoes vs. extending your love (Jan 5).

Is consciousness sparse or abundant? Five dimensions of analysis (Feb 8).

Engaging with evil art: Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (Mar 8).

Birthday cake and a chapel (Apr 21).

Is C3P0 alive? (with Will Swanson, May 11).

Are garden snails conscious? Yes, no, or *gong* (Sep 11).

Narrative, but not philosophical argument, motivates giving to charity (with Chris McVey, Nov 21).

Selected interviews:

What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher? Eric Schwitzgebel (May 8, 2018).

Some Structural Disadvantages of Interdisciplinary Research, and What to Do About Them

My own academic department has treated me well over the years, accepting my interdiscipinary forays into psychology and science fiction. But most academic researchers who do interdisciplinary work face structural disadvantages. I speak from my experience in philosophy, but the problems are deeply rooted in the academic system.

I will focus on two disadvantages: The "But It Isn't X" Complaint (from colleagues from your home discipline) and Prejudice / Turf Defense (from colleagues from disciplines other than your home discipline).

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The "But It Isn't X" Complaint

If you apply for a job in a department in discipline X, the hiring department will care almost exclusively about your work in X. When you stand for promotion or most other sorts of disciplinary recognition, you will be evaluated almost exclusively for your work within the discipline. If you ask for your work outside the discipline to be counted equally, you will be told that it isn't really X and therefore doesn't count for much toward hiring, promotion, or recognition in discipline X.

The "But It Isn't X" Complaint is entirely understandable. Shouldn't hiring and promotion into a philosophy department, for example, and recognition in philosophy, depend on the candidate's contributions to philosophy? And even if in principle the evaluators want work outside of their discipline to count equally, they will feel unable to properly evaluate it. In the disciplinary evaluations on which most of academia is built, within-discipline contributions count most.

The almost inevitable consequence is that researchers who devote substantial time to interdisciplinary work will be severely disadvantaged in hiring, promotion, and disciplinary recognition.

What to Do on Behalf of Your Interdisciplinary Colleagues

If a department wants to recognize interdisciplinary colleagues appropriately in hiring, promotion, and other types of evaluation, they need to ask not "how much has this person contributed to our discipline?" but rather (1.) "how much has this person contributed to academia as a whole?" and (2.) "has this person contributed enough to our discipline to still count as member of this discipline?" Suppose someone straddles two disciplines 50/50, and over some period of time they publish three excellent papers in their home discipline and three excellent papers in another discipline. Evaluate them not according to the three home-discipline papers, with the three others as "frosting", but treat all six papers on a par. Of course, if the majority of papers are in another discipline, at some point it would be reasonable to consider a change of department. But until that time, all contributions should be valued and evaluated by the home department.

If there is to be room in academia, as I think there should be, for people who bridge two disciplines, those people need to be valued for their contributions to both disciplines. If people in their home discipline cannot expertly evaluate that person's interdisciplinary work -- quite understandable! -- they should consult with others from the appropriate discipline, or even better with others who are interdisciplinary between the same two disciplines.

What to Do If You Are the Interdisciplinary Researcher

Assuming your colleagues and evaluators are not implementing the strategy above, as most will not, I advise three strategies:

(1.) Do as much in your home discipline as your colleagues do. Publish the six papers in your home discipline and three outside your discipline. This isn't easy to implement, of course! But one of the advantages of interdisciplinary research is that your expertise outside of your home discipline can be a font of fresh ideas. If your c.v. contains as much good work in X as your colleagues', it doesn't matter so much if they think of your other work as of secondary importance.

(2.) Take advantage of higher-level administrators' appreciation of interdisciplinarity. In my experience, the majority of higher-level administrators (deans, etc.) value interdisciplinarity. Their evaluations rarely matter enough to compensate for the structural disadvantages I mentioned above, but often their evaluations matter somewhat. There are sometimes grant opportunities, teaching release opportunities, or other recognition for interdisciplinary work; keep your eyes open for these. Also, if your disciplinary colleagues are supportive, you can remind them that there are aspects of your research profile that will be attractive to administrators because of your interdisciplinarity. This can lead your colleagues' to be more assertive in making your case than they would otherwise be, anticipating approval from the higher-ups.

(3.) Relabel your work as a contribution to your discipline. This is the boldest move, and it will have mixed success at best. For example, when I first started doing work in psychology I thought of it just as work in psychology that had consequences for philosophy. After all, if you run an empirical experiment that looks like a psychology experiment, or contribute an article to a psychology journal, isn't that doing psychology?

However, starting around 2003, Joshua Knobe, Shaun Nichols, Steve Stich, Jonathan Weinberg, and others started calling their empirical research on non-philosophers' philosophical opinions "experimental philosophy" rather than psychology, and they successfully campaigned to publish some of it in straight-up philosophy journals. They partly succeeded in changing the borders of the discipline of philosophy to include work that would previously have been called psychology. They haven't convinced everyone, of course. Not all philosophers think of "experimental philosophy" as really philosophy. But the situation is better than it was. Arguably, "behavioral economics" is a similar story, even more successful.

Similarly, I have been starting to make the case that writing fiction can also be a way of doing philosophy -- witness Rousseau, Sartre, Nietzsche, Plato, Murdoch, Voltaire, etc.!

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Prejudice / Turf Defense

Interdisciplinary prejudice and turf defense are slightly different but related phenomena.

Interdisciplinary prejudice is the understandable default assumption that someone outside of your discipline isn't going to be nearly as good at work in your discipline as someone whose formal affiliation and training is in your discipline. Turf defense is an emotional reaction to the threatening idea that someone outside of your discipline might be as good as you and your colleagues, or better, at work in your own discipline [ETA:] or that others might falsely perceive them that way.

Usually, interdisciplinary prejudice is justified, and perhaps not deserving of a pejorative label. If a non-philosopher submits something to a philosophy journal, odds are good that it won't be an excellent work of philosophy. If a philosopher tries to run a psychology experiment, odds are good that their methods and analyses won't be as solid as a psychologist's. For similar reasons, turf defense isn't wholly unjustified: You don't want others to mistakenly think that the non-X researcher's probably-inferior work is as good as a disciplinary expert's work, so it makes sense in a way to guard against incursions. The turf defense reaction is also, I think, partly driven by feelings that the outsider is being disrespectful: If an outsider thinks they can come in and beat us at our own game, that seems to suggest that they lack respect for our years of hard work and disciplinary training.

However, sometimes people really can do excellent work in more than one discipline. It takes years of effort to acquire the knowledge and skills; but people do sometimes put in the requisite time and effort. An Associate Professor of X with a strong interdisciplinary focus might have as much knowledge of and experience in Y as an Assistant Professor in Y. (It would be almost superhuman, though, for an Associate Professor in X to have as much knowledge and experience in Y as an Associate Professor in Y, unless the situation is very unusual.) However, even when the outsider does have the requisite knowledge and skills, it is, I fear, a sociological fact that substantial prejudice and turf defense remain.

What to Do on Behalf of Interdisciplinary Colleagues

(1.) Be aware of your possible interdisciplinary prejudice and turf defense and the fact that they are not always justified. Try to evaluate work in your home discipline by someone outside of your home discipline in approximately the same way you would evaluate other contributions to your discipline.

(2.) Implement anonymous review when possible. If the work passes muster, it shouldn't matter if it's from a Stanford professor in your discipline or someone from a less prestigious university with a different disciplinary affiliation or from a construction worker in Tallahassee.

(3.) Where anonymous review isn't possible, downplay departmental affiliations on the first page of articles and applications -- for the same reasons.

What to Do If You Are the Interdisciplinary Researcher

(1.) Collaborate with someone from the other discipline. There appears to be much less prejudice and turf defense when at least one member of the research team is from the target discipline. Furthermore, the collaborator will bring an inside-the-discipline perspective that it is very difficult to achieve from outside a discipline, even if one has substantial expertise.

(2.) Watch for shibboleths. By shibboleths I mean superficial signs of being an insider rather than an outsider. It helps reduce prejudice and turf defense the more you can write and speak indistinguishably from members of the target discipline. (Collaborators can help with this.) If you sound like an outsider, even if your content is good, that will tend to amplify negative reactions to your work.

(3.) Cite thoroughly and carefully early in your project. Show, from the very beginning, thorough and serious engagement with the existing work in the target discipline. This shows respect for that work, reducing the turf defense reaction, and it shows that you have substantial expertise, reducing the prejudice reaction.

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Barring radical changes, structural disadvantages will continue to impair people who do interdisciplinary work. However, I do also believe that there is one major compensatory advantage, over the long run of a research career. Often, the freshest and most fruitful academic ideas come from researchers with expertise in more than one area, who can use their expertise in Y to shine new interesting light on X. Your colleagues won't always appreciate this right away. But in the long run, you will have different things to say than those whose expertise is exclusively within a single discipline. You will have a distinctive perspective and contribution.

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New Experimental Philosophy Blog, and A New Study of Philosophers That Is Looking for Participants

Two quick announcements:

1. There's a new experimental philosophy blog! Check it out. (I've just cross-posted a month-old x-phi post from the Splintered Mind. In the future I'll cross-post x-phi material simultaneously on both.)

2. There's a new study about philosophers' opinions on philosophical questions. Try it out here!

Philosophy as a Second Major: Data by Race and Gender

Last year, I observed that Philosophy relies on double majors more than most other academic disciplines do. Drawing on IPEDS data from the National Center for Education Statistics, for Bachelor's degrees completed in 2016, I found that although only 0.30% of students choose Philosophy as a first major, among those who completed a second major, 1.7% choose Philosophy. I also found that 20% of graduating Philosophy majors had Philosophy as their second major. If we conjecture that double majors with Philosophy as one of their majors are just as likely to list Philosophy first as second (which might not be true, but can't be assessed from the IPEDS data), then 40% of Philosophy majors are double-majoring with something else. [See here for methodological details and more data.]

This year, I thought it would be interesting to break down the results by race and gender. My thought was that maybe women or members of historically underrepresented racial groups might be proportionately more likely than White men to take Philosophy as a second major. White men are disproportionately represented in Philosophy, for whatever (much disputed!) reason. Perhaps women and members of underrepresented racial groups would be more likely to take Philosophy as a second major if they could also major in something else?

To reduce hindsight bias, I encourage you to pause now and reflect on what your guess would be.

Drum roll please....

Results by Gender

NCES uses the gender categories "men" and "women". I examined all U.S. data from the 2009-2010 academic year through the 2016-2017 academic year.

Combining all majors and all years, women were about as likely as men to complete a second major: 5.4% of women did so, compared to 5.1% of men (441,066/8,214,707 vs. 318,372/6,167,753 [p < .001 of course, given the huge numbers]). (All statistical tests in this post are two-tailed two-proportion z tests.) Viewing the data another way, women constituted 57% of all graduates and 58% of all graduates who completed two majors.

Philosophy constituted 0.39% of all first majors across the time period, and 1.9% of all second majors. (These 2009-2017 numbers are higher than the 2016 numbers above because the Philosophy major plummeted sharply during the period.) Women were about a third as likely to complete Philosophy as a first major than men: 0.21% of women did so, compared to 0.62% of men (17,244/8,214,707 vs. 38,241/6,167,753 [p < .001]). Despite 57% of graduates being women, women were only 31% of graduates whose first major was Philosophy.

As I had suspected might be the case, women were a larger proportion of Philosophy graduates whose second major was Philosophy: 35%, instead of 31%. Though the effect size isn't large, it is statistically significant (4,956/14,064 vs. 17,244/55,485 [p < .001]). Put another (perhaps more discouraging) way, 0.65% of women chose Philosophy as a second major, compared to 2.9% of men.

Results by Race

NCES uses the racial categories American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, White, Two or More Races, Race/Ethnicity Unknown, and Nonresident Alien, with these classifications running from the 2010-2011 to the 2016-2017 academic year.

In contrast with gender, race was substantially related to completing a second major, combining all majors.

Percentage of graduates who completed a second major, by race, all majors:

American Indian or Alaska Native: 3.6%
Asian: 5.7%
Black or African American: 2.4%
Hispanic or Latino: 4.8%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 2.8%
White: 5.7%
Two or More Races: 5.3%

To confirm that this wasn't a result of students of different racial identities enrolling in different school types, I checked to see if the results held up for different Carnegie classifications of school types (e.g., Doctorate Universities: Highest Research Activity, Baccalaureate Colleges: Arts & Science Focus), and the same general pattern holds. However, this question merits further exploration.

To see how this looks for Philosophy specifically, it's clearest to compare the breakdown of 1st majors in Philosophy by race with the breakdown of 2nd majors.

First majors in Philosophy, by race:

American Indian or Alaska Native: 0.5%
Asian: 6.1%
Black or African American: 5.1%
Hispanic or Latino: 10.8%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 0.2%
White: 65.4%
Two or More Races: 3.1%

Second majors in Philosophy, by race:

American Indian or Alaska Native: 0.3%
Asian: 5.7%
Black or African American: 3.2%
Hispanic or Latino: 8.5%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 0.1%
White: 69.5%
Two or More Races: 3.8%

Here it is as a bar chart:

[click to clarify and enlarge]

The result is the opposite of what we see with women, and the opposite of what I had predicted: With the exception of "two or more races", students in racial groups other than White were a smaller proportion of graduates with a second major in Philosophy. This was true even of Asian graduates who, combining all majors, were just as likely as White graduates to complete a second major. (All differences in proportion between 1st and 2nd major by race were statistically significant at p < .05.)

Conclusion

Overall across all majors, women weren't much more likely to complete second majors than were men, but they were more likely to do so in Philosophy. Conversely, students from most racial groups other than White were in general substantially less likely to complete second majors than were White students, and the disproportion was even greater among Philosophy majors.

I'm not sure what might explain these patterns or what to do with them. Suggestions welcome!

Three Arguments for Alien Consciousness

Someday we might meet spacefaring aliens who engage us in (what seems to be) conversation. Some philosophers -- for example Susan Schneider and (if I may generalize his claims about superficially isomorphic robots to superficially isomorphic aliens) Ned Block -- have argued that such aliens might not really have conscious experiences. In contrast, I hold what I believe to be the majority view that aliens who outwardly behaved similarly to us would very likely have conscious experiences. In the phrase that Thomas Nagel made famous, there would be "something it is like" to be an alien.

I offer three arguments in defense of this general conclusion. I stipulate that the aliens I'm considering have arisen through a long evolutionary process, that they are capable of sophisticated cooperative technological behavior, and that they interact with us in ways that it is natural for non-philosophers to interpret as having comprehensible linguistic content.

(I set aside some more specific criticisms of Schneider's argument.)

The Linguistic Argument.

An alien descends from its spaceship. Upon meeting the local population, it raises an appendage and begins touching things. It touches its leg and says "bzzbl". It touches its elbow and says "tikpt". It touches a tree and says "illillin". And so forth. Furthermore, it does so in reliable and repeatable ways, so that this behavior is naturally interpreted as linguistic labeling. When a human touches a tree and says "illillin" the alien says "hi". When a human touches a tree and says "bzzbl", the alien says "pu". The pattern of hi/pu responses is naturally interpreted as affirmation and negation. From this starting point, humans seem to learn the alien language and the alien seems to learn the local human language. Learning proceeds smoothly, except for a few understandable hiccups, so that after several months, the aliens and the local humans are cooperating in complex activities with apparently complex linguistic understanding. For example, the alien emits sounds like this: "After I enjoy eating the oak tree down the road by David's house, I plan to take a half-hour nap at the bottom of Blackberry Pond. Could we meet to talk about Martian volcanology after I've finished my nap?" All proceeds as expected. The alien eats the tree, takes the nap, and afterwards engages in what appears to be a dicussion of Martian volcanology. If this was not approximately how things went, the alien would not be the right kind of outwardly similar entity that I have in mind.

To be outwardly similar -- and also just for good architectural reasons in a risky world -- the alien will also presumably be able to discuss its interior states and perceptual states. When it is running low on nutrition and needs to eat, it will say something like "I'm getting hungry". When it can't visually detect a distant object that a human interlocutor is pointing out, it will say something like, "Sorry, I can't see that. Oh, wait, now I can!" When it fears for the safety of its mate who has just wandered onto the highway, it will say something like, "I'm worried that she might be struck by a car" or "I hope she gets across the road okay!" Now suppose a human interlocutor says something like, "Do you really have conscious experiences? I mean, is there something it's like for you to experience red and to feel pain? Do you have imagination and understanding and emotional feelings?" If the alien is generally similar to us in its linguistic behavior, and if the question is phrased clearly enough, it will say yes. I think this is plausible given the rest of the set up, but we can also stipulate if necessary that if such an alien said no it wouldn't be a superficial isomorph outwardly similar to us in the intended respect.

Although I'm not sure how Schneider and Block would react to this particular case, my interlocutor is someone who thinks it still remains a live possibility that the alien really has no conscious experiences underneath it all, because it has the wrong type of internal structure. (Maybe it's made of silicon inside, or hydraulics, or maybe it engages in fast serial cognitive processing rather than parallel processing.) The thought behind the linguistic argument (which I leave undeveloped for now) is that it would be unnatural, awkward, inelegant, and scientifically dubious to interpret the alien's speech as failing to refer both to trees and to genuine conscious mental states that it possesses.

The Grounds of Consciousness Argument.

What theoretical reasons do we have for thinking that creatures other than us have conscious experiences? I'm inclined to think we rely on two main grounds: (a.) sophisticated outward behavior similar to outward behavior that we associate with consciousness in our own case, and (b.) structural similarity between the target creature and us, with respect to the types of structures we associate with consciousness in our own case. By stipulation, (a) favors the alien. So the question is whether divergence in (b) alone would be good enough grounds to seriously doubt the existence of conscious experience despite seemingly-introspective reports about consciousness.

If the structural situation is bad enough, that can ground plausible denial. A remote-controlled puppet with a speaker in its mouth might exhibit sophisticated outward behavior, but we would not want to attribute consciousness to the puppet. (We might want to attribute consciousness to the puppet-manipulator system or at least to the manipulator.) Similarly, we might reasonably doubt the consciousness of an entity programmed specifically to act as though it is conscious, even if that entity passes the Turing test or similar, because there is possibly something suspicious about having such a programming history: Maybe the best explanation of the entity's seeming-consciousness is not that it is conscious but only that it has been programmed to act as though it is. (I'm not saying I agree with that position, only that it is a reasonable position.)

To avoid these doubts about the structural story, I have stipulated that the aliens have a long evolutionary history. The question then becomes whether a naturally-evolved cognitive structure underlying such sophisticated and apparently linguistic behavior might not be sufficient for consciousness, if it is different enough from our own -- such as maybe a fast serial cognitive process rather than the massively parallel (but slowish) structure of neurons, or relying on a material substrate different than carbon. My intended sense of "might" here is not the thin metaphysical sense of "might" in which we might allow for philosophical zombies, but rather scientific plausibility.

A good approach to this question, I think, is to consider what it is about neurons aligned in massively parallel structures that explains why such neurons give rise to consciousness in our case. There must be something functionally awesome about neurons; it's not likely to be mysterious carbon-magic, independent of what neurons can do for us cognitively. So what could be that functionally awesome thing? The most plausible answers are the kinds of answers we see in broadly functionalist approaches to consciousness -- things like the ability to integrate information so as to respond in various sophisticated ways to the environment, including retaining information over time, monitoring one's own cognitive condition, complex long-term strategic planning, being capable of creative solutions to novel predicaments, etc. If serial processing or silicon processing can do all of the right kind of cognitive work, it's hard for me to see good theoretical reason to think that something necessary may be missing due merely to, say, the different number of protons in silicon or the implementational details of transfer relations between different cognitive subprocesses. It's a possible skepticism, but it's a skepticism without warranted grounds for doubt.

The Copernican Cosmological Argument.

According to the Copernican Principle in scientific cosmology, we are unlikely to be in a privileged position in the universe, such as its exact center. It's more reasonable, according to the principle, to think that we are in mediocre, mid-rent location among all of the locations that possibly support observers capable of reflection about cosmological principles. (However, the Anthropic Principle allows that we shouldn't be surprised to be in a location that supports cosmological observers, even if such locations are uncommon. For purposes of this post I am assuming that being an "observer" requires cognitive sophistication but does not require phenomenal consciousness if the two are separable. We can argue about that in the comments, if you like!)

The Copernican Principle can, I think, plausibly be applied to consciousness as follows. Stipulate, as seems plausible, that complex coordinated functional responsiveness to one's environment, comparable to the sophistication of human responsiveness, can evolve in myriad different ways that diverge in their internal structural basis (e.g., carbon vs non-carbon, or if carbon is essential because of its lovely capacity to form long organic molecules, highly divergent carbon-based systems). If only one or a few of these myriad ways gave rise to actual conscious experience, then we would be especially lucky to be among the minority of complex evolved seemingly-linguistic entities who are privileged with genuine conscious experience. There would be systems all across the universe who equally build cities, travel into space, write novels about their interactions with each other, and monitor and report their internal states in ways approximately as sophisticated as ours -- and among them, only a fraction would happen to possess conscious experience, while the other unfortunates are merely blank inside.

It is much more plausible, on Copernican grounds, to think that we are not in this way especially privileged entities, lucky to be among the minority of evolved intelligences who happen also to have conscious experiences.

[image source]

New Book Forthcoming: Jerks, Zombie Robots, and Other Philosophical Misadventures

(title provisional)

with MIT Press, slated for their Fall catalog.

YAY!

I've made the manuscript available here. There will be at least one more chance to revise it, probably in early 2019, and I welcome comments and corrections, either on individual chapters or on the entirety. If you give me helpful comments, I will of course add your name to the acknowledgements at the end of the book.

Preface:

I enjoy writing short philosophical reflections for broad audiences. Evidently, I enjoy this a lot: Since 2006, I’ve written over a thousand such pieces, mostly published on my blog The Splintered Mind, but also in the Los Angeles Times, Aeon Magazine, and elsewhere. This book contains fifty-eight of my favorites, revised and updated.

The topics range widely, as I’ve tried to capture in the title of the book. I discuss moral psychology (“jerks”), speculative philosophy of consciousness (“zombie robots”), the risks of controlling your emotions technologically, the ethics of the game of dreidel, multiverse theory, the apparent foolishness of Immanuel Kant, and much else. There is no unifying topic.

Maybe, however, there is a unifying theme. The human intellect has a ragged edge, where it begins to turn against itself, casting doubt on itself or finding itself lost among seemingly improbable conclusions. We can reach this ragged edge quickly. Sometimes, all it takes to remind us of our limits is an eight-hundred-word blog post. Playing at this ragged edge, where I no longer know quite what to think or how to think about it, is my idea of fun.

Given the human propensity for rationalization and self-deception, when I disapprove of others, how do I know that I’m not the one who is being a jerk? Given that all our intuitive, philosophical, and scientific knowledge of the mind has been built on a narrow range of cases, how much confidence can we have in our conclusions about strange new possibilities that are likely to open up in the near future of Artificial Intelligence? Speculative cosmology at once poses the (literally) biggest questions that we can ask about the universe while opening up possibilities that undermine our confidence in our ability to answer those same questions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. Not all of my posts fit this theme. It’s also fun to use the once-forbidden word “fuck” over and over again in a chapter about profanity. And I wanted to share some reminiscences about how my father saw the world – especially since in some ways I prefer his optimistic and proactive vision to my own less hopeful skepticism. Other of my blog posts I just liked or wanted to share for other reasons. A few are short fictions.

It would be an unusual reader who liked every chapter. I hope you’ll skip anything you find boring. The chapters are all free-standing. Please don’t just start reading on page one and then try to slog along through everything sequentially out of some misplaced sense of duty! Trust your sense of fun (Chapter 47). Read only the chapters that appeal to you, in any order you like.

Riverside, California, Earth (I hope)
October 25, 2018

Full manuscript here.

I Have a Little Dreidel, I Made It Out of... Plastic?

Tonight is the first night of Hannukah. My daughter her friends and I will of course play dreidel.

(I defend my enthusiasm for the game in this article I published last year in the LA Times: "Dreidel: A seemingly foolish game that contains the moral world in miniature".)

We will sing the Dreidel Song.

I have a little dreidel,
I made it out of clay.
And when it's dry and ready,
Oh dreidel I will play!

Here's the problem, though. Never ever have I seen a clay dreidel, much less made one by hand. So the song is a lie!

Some of our dreidels, none made of clay.

I propose the following alternative lyrics:

I have a little dreidel,
They made it out of plastic.
And when I spin a gimmel,
It's gonna be fantastic!

Or:

I have a little dreidel,
They made it out of wood.
And when I spin a gimmel,
It's gonna feel so good!

Or:

I have a little dreidel,
They made it out of steel.
And when I spin a gimmel,
Oh how good I'll feel!

Etc.

Not sure what to do with the aluminum dreidel, though....