An Argument for Physical Laws Too Small-Scale and Too Large-Scale for Us to Detect

The universe might be infinitely large. As Jacob Barandes and I have argued (Ch 7 of The Weirdness of the World; free draft version here), infinitude seems the most straightforward extension of current mainstream physics and cosmology. A finite universe would presumably require either an edge, which produces complexities for which there is no evidence, or the right kind of curvature, contra evidence that the universe is approximately flat at large scales.

If the universe is infinitely large, then it is at least conceivable that there are conscious entities compared to whom we are arbitrarily small. Here's how I express the idea in the conclusion of Weirdness:

I stroll through my suburban neighborhood in heavy rain. Gushing runoff strikes a fallen branch, and droplets leap a foot in the air. I imagine, inside one of those droplets, creatures so tiny that the universe they see through their telescopes is a trillionth of the radius of a proton, while a nanosecond encompasses 10^30 lifetimes. What could they know of us, from deep inside that arcing droplet? If the cosmos is infinite, we might know as little as they do about the unimaginably vast structures that embed us.

At sufficiently small scales, the effects of gravity are virtually undetectable. Compared to the strong nuclear force, the "weak" nuclear force, and electromagnetism, gravity is about 10^29 to 10^38 (approximately a trillion trillion trillion) times weaker. It has virtually no influence over what happens at subatomic scales. However, it accumulates over long distances, making its influence detectable at larger scales.

If there were entities as small as the ones I imagined in my droplet, it's plausible that they would be too small to detect the influence of gravity, even if they had technological tools as good as our own, scaled to their size. Correspondingly, if there are entities vastly larger than us, we might imagine them knowing of a force vastly weaker than gravity but which accumulates detectably over distances much larger than the mere tiny, minuscule, virtually negligible 93 billion light years that we can observe.

Of course we have no direct evidence that such a force exists. But neither do we have evidence against the possibility. Whether it's reasonable to guess that such a force exists depends on what we should assume as the null hypothesis or default presupposition.

In one way of thinking, the default presupposition should be that there is no such force. According to Occam's Razor, we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. If forces are "entities" in the relevant sense, this suggests that without positive evidence of an extremely weak, extremely long distance force, we should assume there is no such force.

On the other hand, Copernican or anti-specialness principles hold that we should default toward assuming that we aren't in a special position in the universe (such as its exact center), pending contrary evidence. Considered in a certain way, we would be oddly special if we were just the right size to observe all the forces of nature. If there are entities vastly vastly bigger, they presumably would not be able to observe the strong nuclear force with equipment of the caliber we have (scaled to their size). If there are entities vastly vastly smaller, they presumably couldn't observe gravity. Why should we be so special as to see every force there is? Better to assume that we are not so special, and thus that there are forces that operate on scales we cannot (as a practical matter) observe.

[Dall-E rendition of tiny scientists inside a molecule floating through space]

Consider a scale of force-strength ranging from arbitrarily close to zero to positive infinitude, scaled so that gravity counts as force-strength = 1, the weak nuclear force as 10^29, electromagnetism as 10^36, and the strong nuclear force as 10^38. Even just on a finite scale from 10^-1000000000000000 to 10^1000000000000000, this would be a remarkable clustering near the middle. If the force-strengths we could potentially detect with our equipment are in the range from, say, 10^-15 to 10^60, then that is the space of possible force-strengths that we have sampled in. If we find forces scattered at values 1, 29, 36, and 38 in the range -15 to +60, then it's not an unreasonable guess that these four values constitute a random distribution within our detection capacities and that if we could sample from a wider range we would find other forces that we cannot currently detect.

(I don't have a good sense of realistically what force-strengths we could potentially detect. The larger the scale -- say from 10^-1000 to 10^1000 -- the less that 1, 29, 36, and 38 look like a random sample, and the more reason we would have to think that something ensures that force-strengths stay within a magnitude not far from 1.  If it seems odd that there would be forces too strong for us to detect, consider that on our scale and speed, an entity held together by a very strong, fast-acting force that diminishes very sharply with distance might look to us like an unbreakable fundamental particle.)

The case for entities vastly larger than us seems stronger than the case for entities vastly smaller than us. If the universe is infinite, then there will be structures arbitrarily vastly larger than us, and unless something ensures that those structures are flat and bland, some of those structures will be complex and possibly even support the evolution of intelligence through natural selection.

But now we can again apply the Copernican Principle. If we accept -- look, I know I'm already far out on a limb here, but humor me -- that there are infinitely many complex structures vastly larger than us in an unending upward scaling (the first set of vastly larger entities being vastly smaller than the next set of vastly larger entities and so on), it would be strangely un-Copernican if we just happened to be the smallest scale intelligent entities.

ETA 09:32, Aug 21:

The following concern has arisen several times in discussion, so I'll add it here:

Concern: Isn't the speed of light a constraint that would make extremely large entities incoherent, since it would take so long for a signal to go from one end of the entity to the other?

Response: Assuming the speed of light as a constraint, vast entities would have to be extremely slow-paced (from our perspective). But since we have literal infinitude to play with, that shouldn't matter. They might seem static to us, if we could detect them, just as we might seem static to the entities in my water droplet who experience 10^30 lifetimes in a nanosecond.

Women Constitute 12% and People of Color 3% of the Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Last week, I posted a list of the 376 most-cited contemporary authors (born 1900 or later) in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Citation in the SEP is, I think, a better measure of influence in what I call "mainstream Anglophone philosophy" than more standard bibliometric measures, like Google Scholar and Web of Science.

In previous work, my collaborators and I have generally found that within U.S. academic philosophy, the higher in rank or prestige the target group, the less racial and gender diversity. Accordingly, one might expect people at very highest levels of prestige in mainstream Anglophone philosophy overwhelmingly to be non-Hispanic White men.

I attempted to code the gender (woman, man, nonbinary) of every philosopher in the SEP most-cited 376, based on a combination of personal and professional knowledge, information from the web, and gender-typicality of their name and photos. On similar grounds, I attempted to code every author on this list as either Hispanic/Latino or non-Hispanic/Latino and, among the non-Hispanic authors, White or non-White (using race/ethnicity categories as standardly defined in the U.S.). This is an imperfect exercise, and it wouldn't surprise me if I've made some mistakes. I hope you'll correct me if you notice any errors (raw data here), and please accept my apologies in advance![1]

I also guessed birth year. In the majority of cases, I found birthyear information on Wikipedia or another easily available source. Otherwise, I estimated based on year of Bachelor's degree (estimating 22 years old), year of PhD (estimating 29 years old), or year of first solo-authored publication (also estimating 29 years old). This enables some generational comparisons. Again, I welcome corrections.

Overall, among the 376 philosophers, I count 44 women (12%) and one non-binary person (#223, Judith Butler). I count only eleven (3%) who are Hispanic and/or non-White. Only one of the 376 is a woman of color (#260, Linda Martín Alcoff), and 321 (85%) are non-Hispanic White men.

Here it is as a pie chart:

[click to enlarge and clarify]

The gender skew is even more extreme if we consider the top 100 (actually the top 102, accounting for ties): six women (6%) and 97% non-Hispanic White. The highest ranked person of color is Jaegwon Kim at #59.

As you might expect, the skew is larger in the older generations (born before 1946) than in the younger generations. Over the past several decades, there has tended to be a slow reduction in gender and racial disparity in U.S. academic philosophy (see, e.g., here and here). However, the generational disparity reduction in the SEP is fairly small.

I analyzed generational trends in two ways: First, I binned philosophers by estimated birthyear into one of four generations: "Greatest" (1900-1924), "Silent" (1925-1945), "Boomer" (1946-1964), and "Generation X" (1965-1979). (One "Millenial" was [update Aug 14] Two older Millennials were binned with the Gen-Xers.) Second, I looked at correlations between the demographic categories and birthyear.

Gender analysis by generation:
Greatest: 40/44 men (91%)
Silent: 133/145 (92%)
Boomer: 116/136 (85%)
Gen X: 42/51 (82%)

Expressed as a correlation of gender (man = 1, woman or nonbinary = 0) with birthyear: r = -.10, p = .046. This negative correlation indicates that as birthyear increases (i.e., the philosopher is younger), the philosopher is less likely to be a man. However, the size of the effect is small and barely crosses the conventional p < .05 threshold of statistical significance. The nine highest-ranked Gen-Xers are all White men. No Gen X women rank among the top 200.

Among the eleven philosophers who are Hispanic/Latino or non-White, none are Greatest, five are Silent, four are Boomers, and two are Gen X. Statistical analysis is of limited value with such small numbers, but for what it's worth, status in this category does directionally correlate with birthyear, with a very small effect size and no statistical significance (r = -.06, p = .25).

ETA 10:46 a.m.:

To see if there's a relationship between gender and rank on the list, I took the natural log of the ranks (since the difference between rank 1 and rank 11 is much more meaningful than between rank 301 and 311) and calculated its correlation with gender (1 = man, 0 = woman or nonbinary): r = -.12, p = .016. The negative relationship of course indicates that men are likely to be higher ranked (i.e., closer to rank 1). As before, race/ethnicity numbers are probably too small for meaningful statistical analysis, but for completeness the result is a virtually flat r = -.02, p = .77.

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

In an independent analysis, Liam Kofi Bright counts nine non-White philosophers on this list, exactly matching my analysis except omitting two (not non-White?) Latino philosophers (Sosa and Bueno). This supports my sense of how the philosophers on this list are racially perceived by others in the field. (One complication: Bueno identifies as Brazilian, and there's a lot of confusion about whether Brazilian counts as "Hispanic" in the U.S. context.)

The 376 Most-Cited Contemporary Authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Time for my five-year update of the most-cited authors in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy! (Past analyses: 2010, 2014, 2019.)

Image of a young David K. Lewis [source]

Method

* Only authors born 1900 or later are included.

* Each author is only counted once per headline entry (subentries are excluded). In 2010, I found that this generated more plausible results than counting authors multiple times per entry.

* As in 2019, but unlike 2014 and 2010, I include co-authors. Due to the unsystematic formatting of SEP references, this was a somewhat noisy process. To capture last authors, I searched for "and" or "&" in each bibliographic line, if appearing before a "19", "20", "forthcoming", or "in press", then pulled the text immediately after. To capture second authors that were not last authors, I searched for a second comma before such a date-preceding "and" or "&", then pulled the text after that. I omitted co-authors in position three or higher unless they were last author. Fortunately for the analysis, co-authorship is relatively uncommon in philosophy compared to the sciences, constituting by my estimate less than 10% of the bibliographic lines.

* Also as in 2019 but unlike 2014, I included editors, but only if their name appears before the date in the bibliographical line. Putting the editor at the front of the bibliographical line highlights the editor's role or the edited collection as a whole.

* After computerized search and sort, I hand-coded the data, in some cases correcting misspellings and merging authors (e.g., Ruth Barcan = Ruth Marcus), more often separating authors with similar names (e.g., various A. Goldmans and J. Cohens), in a process that involved some guesswork and pattern recognition. Inconsistent syntax and imperfect redundancy removal procedures also created some error, though nothing large or systematic that I noticed. Bear in mind that with about 208,000 bibliographic entries, perfection is not possible! I estimate coding error of up to about +/- 2 entries.

* To find the equivalent score of an author not included on this list, you can search the SEP site and count the number of hits, subtracting appearances in subentries and appearances other than first, second, or last headline editor or author in a bibliographic line (near the beginning of the entry, before the date). I also welcome thoughtful corrections that apply this method.

This list generates a rough measure of current influence in what I call "mainstream Anglophone philosophy" (a sociological category I have defined and discussed, e.g., here and here). For example, the top five -- Lewis, Quine, Putnam, Rawls, and Kripke -- are the same (in a different order) as the top five in Brian Leiter's poll results concerning the best Anglophone philosophers since 1957. Better-known bibliographic metrics, like Google Scholar and Web of Science do not as accurately measure this particular sociological phenomenon. See my 2021 discussion of ranking philosophy rankings.

The list captures, if anything, a moment in one particular academic philosophical culture. For example, despite Michel Foucault's huge global academic influence, mainstream Anglophone philosophers rarely cite him, and on this list he ranks #187.

Further caveats:

* Philosophers who work on topics that are underrepresented in the Stanford Encyclopedia relative to their visibility in mainstream Anglophone philosophy will appear lower on the list than their eminence would suggest.

* Authors who have a transformative impact in one area will probably be underrepresented or underranked relative to authors who make significant but less transformative contributions to several topics.

* Editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia might be somewhat overrepresented, since they might tend to disproportionately solicit entries on topics to which they have contributed and authors might feel some pressure to cite them in their entries.

* Given a large bias toward citing recent work, philosophers whose main contributions were before 1960 are probably substantially underrated on this list relative to their influence in mainstream Anglophone philosophy.

* Yes, I'm on this list (in a tie for #232). I find this somewhat embarrassing, since I think this method substantially overrates me (see the 2nd and 4th caveats). If you could withhold congratulations and comparisons, I'd appreciate it!

As I did in 2019, I will follow up later with some demographic analyses. Thanks to UCR comp lit and philosophy student Jordan Jackson for his help with the computer code.

[Updated Aug. 9, to remove two authors born before 1900 and to correct one misspelling.]

1. Lewis, David K. (cited in 307 different main entries)
2. Quine, Willard van Orman (213)
3. Putnam, Hilary (190)
4. Rawls, John (168)
5. Kripke, Saul A. (159)
6. Williamson, Timothy (152)
7. Davidson, Donald (151)
8. Williams, Bernard (146)
9. Nussbaum, Martha C. (140)
10. Nagel, Thomas (137)
11. Nozick, Robert (135)
12. Jackson, Frank (130)
13. Searle, John R. (120)
14. Chalmers, David J. (117)
14. Van Fraassen, Bas C. (117)
16. Harman, Gilbert H. (116)
16. Strawson, Peter F. (116)
18. Fodor, Jerry A. (115)
19. Fine, Kit (112)
19. Parfit, Derek (112)
19. Stalnaker, Robert C. (112)
22. Dennett, Daniel C. (110)
22. Dummett, Michael A. E. (110)
24. Kitcher, Philip (109)
24. Pettit, Philip (109)
26. Armstrong, David M. (106)
26. Chisholm, Roderick M. (106)
28. Van Inwagen, Peter (102)
29. Dworkin, Ronald (101)
29. Scanlon, Thomas M. (101)
29. Sober, Elliott (101)
32. Hawthorne, John (97)
33. McDowell, John H. (96)
34. Popper, Karl R. (94)
35. Goodman, Nelson (90)
35. Hacking, Ian (90)
37. Raz, Joseph (89)
38. Geach, Peter T. (88)
38. Goldman, Alvin I. (88)
40. Anderson, Elizabeth S. (83)
40. Bennett, Jonathan (83)
42. Hintikka, Jaakko (82)
43. Adams, Robert Merrihew (81)
43. Plantinga, Alvin C. (81)
45. Anscombe, G. E. M. (80)
45. Korsgaard, Christine M. (80)
45. Mackie, John L. (80)
45. Schaffer, Jonathan (80)
45. Tarski, Alfred (80)
45. Wright, Crispin (80)
51. Priest, Graham (79)
52. Dretske, Fred I. (78)
53. Alston, William P. (77)
53. Burge, Tyler (77)
55. Ayer, Alfred J. (76)
55. Gibbard, Allan (76)
55. Gödel, Kurt (76)
58. Horgan, Terence E. (75)
59. Kim, Jaegwon (73)
59. Stich, Stephen P. (73)
61. Kaplan, David (72)
61. Thomson, Judith Jarvis (72)
63. Field, Hartry H. (71)
63. Kuhn, Thomas S. (71)
63. Lycan, William G. (71)
63. Rescher, Nicholas (71)
63. Sellars, Wilfrid (71)
63. Singer, Peter (71)
69. Blackburn, Simon (70)
69. Evans, Gareth (70)
69. Hempel, Carl G. (70)
69. Zalta, Edward N. (70)
73. Frankfurt, Harry G. (69)
73. Ramsey, Frank P. (69)
73. Rosen, Gideon (69)
73. Sosa, Ernest (69)
73. Woodward, James (69)
78. Earman, John (68)
78. Perry, John (68)
78. Sider, Theodore (68)
78. Smith, Michael (68)
78. Waldron, Jeremy (68)
83. Feinberg, Joel (67)
83. Sen, Amartya K. (67)
83. Swinburne, Richard G. (67)
83. Wiggins, David (67)
87. Barnes, Jonathan (66)
87. Lowe, E. J. (66)
87. Skyrms, Brian (66)
87. Velleman, J. David (66)
91. Annas, Julia (65)
91. MacIntyre, Alasdair (65)
91. Shoemaker, Sydney S. (65)
94. Darwall, Stephen L. (64)
94. Grice, H. Paul (64)
94. Ryle, Gilbert (64)
94. Shapiro, Stewart (64)
98. Nichols, Shaun (63)
98. Prior, Arthur N. (63)
98. Soames, Scott (63)
98. Taylor, Charles (63)
98. Yablo, Stephen (63)
103. Church, Alonzo (62)
103. Habermas, Jürgen (62)
103. Young, Iris Marion (62)
106. Block, Ned (61)
106. Jeffrey, Richard C. (61)
108. Friedman, Michael (60)
108. Hare, Richard M. (60)
108. Peacocke, Christopher (60)
111. Brink, David O. (59)
111. Burgess, John P. (59)
111. Cartwright, Nancy (59)
111. Sorabji, Richard (59)
115. Austin, J. L. (57)
115. Smart, J. J. C. (57)
115. van Benthem, Johan F. (57)
118. Arneson, Richard J. (56)
118. Foot, Philippa (56)
118. Kenny, Anthony (56)
118. Miller, David (56)
118. Papineau, David (56)
123. Dupré, John (55)
123. Irwin, Terence H. (55)
123. Simons, Peter M. (55)
126. Audi, Robert (54)
126. Dancy, Jonathan (54)
126. McGinn, Colin (54)
129. Churchland, Paul M. (53)
129. Devitt, Michael (53)
129. Godfrey-Smith, Peter (53)
129. Hart, H. L. A. (53)
129. Parsons, Terence (53)
134. Belnap, Nuel D. (52)
134. Carruthers, Peter (52)
134. Chomsky, Noam (52)
134. Tye, Michael (52)
138. Buchanan, Allen E. (51)
138. Clark, Andy (51)
138. Glymour, Clark (51)
138. Rorty, Richard (51)
138. Sedley, David N. (51)
138. Stanley, Jason (51)
138. Wolterstorff, Nicholas (51)
145. Griffiths, Paul E. (50)
145. LePore, Ernest (50)
145. Montague, Richard (50)
145. Schofield, Malcolm (50)
145. von Neumann, John (50)
150. Barwise, Jon (49)
150. Brandom, Robert B. (49)
150. Haslanger, Sally (49)
150. Johnston, Mark (49)
150. Railton, Peter (49)
150. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter (49)
156. Appiah, Kwame Anthony (48)
156. Boolos, George (48)
156. Enoch, David (48)
156. Millikan, Ruth Garrett (48)
156. Prinz, Jesse J. (48)
156. Salmon, Wesley C. (48)
156. Sartre, Jean-Paul (48)
156. Strawson, Galen (48)
156. Stump, Eleonore (48)
165. Cooper, John M. (47)
165. Horwich, Paul (47)
165. Kretzmann, Norman (47)
165. Longino, Helen E. (47)
165. Mancosu, Paolo (47)
165. Sterelny, Kim (47)
165. Weatherson, Brian (47)
165. Wood, Allen W. (47)
173. Feferman, Solomon (46)
173. Hale, Bob (46)
173. Kahneman, Daniel (46)
173. Levy, Neil (46)
173. Norton, John D. (46)
173. Sandel, Michael J. (46)
173. Suppes, Patrick (46)
180. Guyer, Paul (45)
180. Maudlin, Tim (45)
180. Mellor, D. Hugh (45)
180. Okin, Susan Moller (45)
180. Read, Stephen L. (45)
180. Salmón, Nathan U. (45)
180. Van Cleve, James (45)
187. Beiser, Frederick C. (44)
187. Burnyeat, Myles F. (44)
187. Cohen, Gerald A. (44)
187. Foucault, Michel (44)
187. Hurka, Thomas (44)
187. McLaughlin, Brian P. (44)
187. Mele, Alfred R. (44)
187. O'Neill, Onora (44)
187. Unger, Peter (44)
196. Broome, John (43)
196. Davies, Martin (43)
196. Elster, Jon (43)
196. Hull, David L. (43)
196. Lehrer, Keith (43)
196. Scheffler, Samuel (43)
196. Walzer, Michael (43)
203. Boghossian, Paul A. (42)
203. Craver, Carl F. (42)
203. Finnis, John (42)
203. Gauthier, David P. (42)
203. Goodin, Robert E. (42)
203. Kriegel, Uriah (42)
203. Laudan, Larry (42)
203. List, Christian (42)
203. Loewer, Barry (42)
203. Nolan, Daniel (42)
203. Slote, Michael A. (42)
203. Sunstein, Cass R. (42)
203. Thomasson, Amie L. (42)
203. Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus (42)
217. Byrne, Alex (41)
217. Fricker, Miranda (41)
217. Kymlicka, Will (41)
217. Long, A. A. (41)
217. Schiffer, Stephen (41)
217. Smith, Barry (at Buffalo) (41)
223. Bach, Kent (40)
223. Barry, Brian (40)
223. Butler, Judith (40)
223. Garber, Daniel (40)
223. Heil, John (40)
223. Huemer, Michael (40)
223. Machery, Edouard (40)
223. Merricks, Trenton (40)
223. Restall, Greg (40)
232. Bealer, George (39)
232. Bechtel, William (39)
232. Colyvan, Mark (39)
232. Crisp, Roger (39)
232. Feldman, Fred (39)
232. Gabbay, Dov M. (39)
232. Gärdenfors, Peter (39)
232. Hampton, Jean (39)
232. McMahan, Jeff (39)
232. Nagel, Ernest (39)
232. Schwitzgebel, Eric (39)
232. Wolf, Susan (39)
244. Bird, Alexander (38)
244. Bueno, Otávio (38)
244. Crane, Tim (38)
244. Gendler, Tamar Szabó (38)
244. Hájek, Alan (38)
244. Ladyman, James (38)
244. Pasnau, Robert (38)
251. Feldman, Richard (37)
251. Halpern, Joseph Y. (37)
251. Kagan, Shelly (37)
251. Lange, Marc (37)
251. Pearl, Judea (37)
251. Pollock, John L. (37)
251. Rosenberg, Alex (37)
251. Schroeder, Mark (37)
251. Wedgwood, Ralph (37)
260. Alcoff, Linda Martín (36)
260. Baker, Lynne Rudder (36)
260. Bonjour, Laurence (36)
260. Brandt, Richard B. (36)
260. Conee, Earl (36)
260. Feyerabend, Paul K. (36)
260. Lewontin, Richard C. (36)
260. Linsky, Bernard (36)
260. Lloyd, Elisabeth A. (36)
260. Marcus, Ruth Barcan (36)
260. Sperber, Dan (36)
260. Teller, Paul (36)
272. Adamson, Peter (35)
272. Beall, J. C. (35)
272. Boyd, Richard (35)
272. Bratman, Michael E. (35)
272. Callender, Craig (35)
272. Cresswell, Max J. (35)
272. Hitchcock, Christopher R. (35)
272. Hurley, Susan L. (35)
272. Kittay, Eva Feder (35)
272. Matthen, Mohan (35)
272. Okasha, Samir (35)
272. Parsons, Charles (35)
272. Sainsbury, R. Mark (35)
272. Scott, Dana S. (35)
272. Sorensen, Roy A. (35)
287. Benacerraf, Paul (34)
287. Benhabib, Seyla (34)
287. Brogaard, Berit (34)
287. Cohen, Joshua (34)
287. Currie, Greg (34)
287. Darden, Lindley (34)
287. Flanagan, Owen (34)
287. Kahn, Charles H. (34)
287. Kamm, Frances M. (34)
287. Kleene, Stephen C. (34)
287. Mulligan, Kevin (34)
287. Paul, Laurie A. (34)
287. Pereboom, Derk (34)
287. Pogge, Thomas W. (34)
287. Recanati, François (34)
287. Shafer-Landau, Russ (34)
287. Thagard, Paul (34)
287. Watson, Gary (34)
305. Baier, Annette C. (33)
305. Barnes, Elizabeth (33)
305. Black, Max (33)
305. Gallagher, Shaun (33)
305. Giere, Ronald N. (33)
305. Gould, Stephen Jay (33)
305. Griffin, James (33)
305. Kneale, William (33)
305. Price, Huw (33)
305. Pritchard, Duncan (33)
305. Thomason, Richmond H. (33)
305. Turing, Alan M. (33)
305. Tversky, Amos (33)
305. Wimsatt, William C. (33)
319. Adams, Marilyn McCord (32)
319. Beebee, Helen C. (32)
319. Bennett, Karen (32)
319. Craig, William Lane (32)
319. Ebbesen, Sten (32)
319. Frede, Michael (32)
319. Hatfield, Gary (32)
319. Kreisel, Georg (32)
319. Langton, Rae (32)
319. Levinson, Jerrold (32)
319. Machamer, Peter (32)
319. Pateman, Carole (32)
319. Penrose, Roger (32)
319. Rey, Georges (32)
319. Varzi, Achille C. (32)
319. Zimmerman, Dean W. (32)
335. Allison, Henry E. (31)
335. Ashworth, E. Jennifer (31)
335. Berlin, Isaiah (31)
335. Cappelen, Herman (31)
335. Copp, David (31)
335. Daniels, Norman (31)
335. Hartmann, Stephan (31)
335. Hellman, Geoffrey Paul (31)
335. Hooker, Brad (31)
335. Kornblith, Hilary (31)
335. Kvanvig, Jonathan L. (31)
335. Leitgeb, Hannes (31)
335. MacFarlane, John (31)
335. MacKinnon, Catharine A. (31)
335. McDaniel, Kris (31)
335. Mills, Charles W. (31)
335. Oppy, Graham (31)
335. Rea, Michael (31)
335. Sarkar, Sahotra (31)
335. Savulescu, Julian (31)
335. Sylvan, Richard (31)
335. Vlastos, Gregory (31)
357. Bayne, Tim (30)
357. Butterfield, Jeremy (30)
357. Cameron, Ross P. (30)
357. Dawkins, Richard (30)
357. Egan, Andy (30)
357. Fischer, John Martin (30)
357. Gaus, Gerald F. (30)
357. Hill, Thomas E., Jr. (30)
357. Hodges, Wilfrid (30)
357. Hornsby, Jennifer (30)
357. Howson, Colin (30)
357. Joyce, Richard (30)
357. Kneale, Martha (30)
357. Levi, Isaac (30)
357. Maynard Smith, John (30)
357. Nadler, Steven (30)
357. Scruton, Roger (30)
357. Siegel, Susanna (30)
357. Von Wright, Georg Henrik (30)
357. Weisberg, Michael (30)

The Problem with Calling Trump and Vance Weird

[my op-ed in today's LA Times]

Democratic politicians and pundits have recently begun throwing this insult at Republican presidential contender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance: “weird.” As a scholar who has made my academic career in part by celebrating weirdness, I object. Trump and Vance don’t deserve the compliment.

The weird should be understood as whatever is strikingly contrary to the ordinary, predictable and readily understood. It is a contrast with the normal. Consider blades of grass. Although no two are exactly the same, their variation keeps to certain limits. But here’s a blade that splits into three halfway up, with each finger curling around in a loop. Why would it do that? Now that’s a weird blade of grass!

Recently, my family and I visited Hayao Miyazaki’s Ni-Tele Really Big Clock in Tokyo. What a weird object: It looms from the side of a skyscraper, featuring mannequins and giant bird claws. When noon strikes, one claw opens to reveal a smiling sun, a fish tail bangs a gong and a bell-headed mannequin enacts a goofy dance. Nature also offers plenty of weirdness, such as the miraculously thin, Seussian piles of stone in Utah’s Bryce Canyon, the surreal mineral-deposit terraces of Pamukkale in Turkey and gloriously bizarre fish and fungi around the world.

[Hayao Miyazaki’s Ni-Tele Really Big Clock in Tokyo]

The Democrats are getting mileage from calling Trump and Vance “weird.” The word has been used enough by allies of Vice President Kamala Harris and her presidential campaign to receive substantial news coverage as a political strategy — even praise for its success. The resonance of this strategy reflects a widespread misunderstanding of who deserves to be called weird. The term should conjure the guy who rides through Berkeley on a unicycle, wearing a top hat; the business school standout who drops out to live on an organic seed farm; the middle school kid who plasters their bedroom with posters of squids and snails, ignoring pop culture in favor of a deep fascination with mollusk biology. Each is, in their own way, a wonder of nature, and the world is richer for having them.

Trump’s and Vance’s behavior, on the other hand, reflects something more troubling. Their views toward women and reproductive rights, for example — demeaning the former and opposing the latter — are inappropriate and deservedly in the minority. But those views, unfortunately, are not rare enough to be truly weird. In fact, in contemporary America, Trump and Vance are normal, predictable and readily understood. They are ordinary, self-serving politicians, conforming to the demands of those who have rewarded their behavior.

And even if these perspectives were more unusual, that would not be the source of these politicians’ badness. Yes, some unusual things are bad, such as serial killings. And Trump does have his head-scratching moments — consider the frequent references to fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter on the campaign trail. But things and people are not bad because they are weird. It seriously misrepresents the nature of Trump’s and Vance’s departure from liberal values to treat weirdness as their headline flaw.

What is it to be liberal? It is to tolerate, or even to celebrate, others with different values and practices. Liberal parents permit their children to make choices other than their own. Liberal societies are pluralistic and egalitarian, not requiring citizens to adhere to mainstream culture and religion.

There are always some gardeners who would prefer to mow down the weird blade of grass, and some people are similarly made uncomfortable by others they regard as weird. These are the people for whom “weird” is a choice insult. In the conformist hellscape of middle school (or at least of some middle schools), bands of lookalike kids who prize their normality — even more, their being perceived as normal — taunt the kids who don’t easily fit in, such as the mollusk lover. I was insulted as “weird” in school myself. But I grew to embrace my own weirdness and weirdness in general. I realized that to use “weird” as an insult is implicitly to accept a conformist worldview — a worldview that devalues rather than appreciates difference and novelty.

Our Democratic politicians and pundits are, and should be, better than that. The Democrats pride themselves on being the party of diversity, on accepting people with a wide range of worldviews, cultures, sexual orientations, life experiences and interests, on making room for nonconformists and those outside the mainstream.

Using “weird” as a term of mockery, as though that’s the best descriptor of Trump and Vance, may be politically advantageous right now. But it denigrates the truly weird. Instead, call Trump and Vance liars, authoritarians, conscienceless political shape-shifters and wrong on policy. Those are ample, and more appropriate, reasons to vote against them.

A Metaethics of Alien Convergence

I'm not a metaethicist, but I am a moral realist (I think there are facts about what really is morally right and wrong) and also -- bracketing some moments of skeptical weirdness -- a naturalist (I hold that scientific defensibility is essential to justification).  Some people think that moral realism and naturalism conflict, since moral truths seem to lie beyond the reach of science.  They hold that science can discover what is, but not what ought to be, that it can discover what people regard as ethical or unethical, but not what really is ethical or unethical.

Addressing this apparent conflict between moral realism and scientific naturalism (for example, in a panel discussion with Stephan Wolfram and others a few months ago), I find I have a somewhat different metaethical perspective than others I know.

Generally speaking, I favor what we might call a rational convergence model, in broadly the vein of Firth, Habermas, Railton, and Scanlon (bracketing what, to insiders, will seem like huge differences).  An action is ethically good if it is the kind of action people would tend on reflection to endorse.  Or, more cautiously, if it's the kind of action that certain types of observers, in certain types of conditions, would tend, upon certain types of reflection, to converge on endorsing.

Immediately, four things stand out about this metaethical picture:

(1.) It is extremely vague.  It's more of a framework for a view than an actual view, until the types of observers, conditions, and reflection are specified.

(2.) It might seem to reverse the order of explanation.  One might have thought that rational convergence, to the extent it exists, would be explained by observers noticing ethical facts that hold independently of any hypothetical convergence, not vice versa.

(3.) It's entirely naturalistic, and perhaps for that reason disappointing to some.  No non-natural facts are required.  We can scientifically address questions about what conclusions observers will tend to converge on.  If you're looking for a moral "ought" that transcends every scientifically approachable "is" and "would", you won't find it here.  Moral facts turn out just to be facts about what would happen in certain conditions.

(4.) It's stipulative and revisionary.  I'm not saying that this is what ordinary people do mean by "ethical".  Rather, I'm inviting us to conceptualize ethical facts this way.  If we fill out the details correctly, we can get most of what we should want from ethics.

Specifying a bit more: The issue to which I've given the most thought is who are the relevant observers whose hypothetical convergence constitutes the criterion of morality?  I propose: developmentally expensive and behaviorally sophisticated social entities, of any form.  Imagine a community not just of humans but of post-humans (if any), and alien intelligences, and sufficiently advanced AI systems, actual and hypothetical.  What would this diverse group of intelligences tend to agree on?  Note that the hypothesized group is broader than humans but narrower than all rational agents.  I'm not sure any other convergence theorist has conceptualized the set of observers in exactly this way.  (I welcome pointers to relevant work.)

[Dall-E image of a large auditorium of aliens, robots, humans, sea monsters, and other entities arguing with each other]

You might think that the answer would be the empty set: Such a diverse group would agree on nothing.  For any potential action that one alien or AI system might approve of, we can imagine another alien or AI system who intractably disapproves of that action.  But this is too quick, for two reasons:

First, my metaethical view requires only a tendency for members of this group to approve.  If there are a few outlier species, no problem, as long as approval would be sufficiently widespread in a broad enough range of suitable conditions.

(Right, I haven't specified the types of conditions and types of reflection.  Let me gesture vaguely toward conditions of extended reflection involving exposure to a wide range of relevant facts and exposure to a wide range of alternative views, in reflective conditions of open dialogue.)

Second, as I've emphasized, though the group isn't just humans, not just any old intelligent reasoner gets to be in the club.  There's a reason I specify developmentally expensive and behaviorally sophisticated social entities.  Developmental expense entails that life is not cheap.  Behavioral sophistication entails (stipulatively, as I would define "behavioral sophistication") a capacity for structuring complex long-term goals, coordinating in sophisticated ways with others, and communicating via language at least as expressively flexible and powerful as human language.  And sociality entails that such sophisticated coordination and communication happens in a complex, stable, social network of some sort.

To see how these constraints generate predictive power, consider the case of deception.  It seems clear that any well-functioning society will need some communicative norms that favor truth-telling over deceit, if the communication is going to be useful.  Similarly, there will need to be some norms against excessive freeloading.  These needn't be exceptionless norms, and they needn't take the same form in every society of every type of entity.  Maybe, even, there could be a few rare societies where deceiving those who are trying to cooperate with you is the norm; but you see how it would probably require a rare confluence of other factors for a society to function that way.

Similarly, if the entities are developmentally expensive, a resource-constrained society won't function well if they are sacrificed willy-nilly without sufficient cause.  The acquisition of information will presumably also tend to be valued -- both short-term practically applicable information and big-picture understandings that might yield large dividends in the long term.  Benevolence will be valued, too: Reasoners in successful societies will tend to appreciate and reward those who help them and others on whom they depend.  Again, there will be enormous variety in the manifestation of the virtues of preserving others, preserving resources, acquiring knowledge, enacting benevolence, and so on.

Does this mean that if the majority of alien lifeforms breathe methane, it will be morally good to replace Earth's oxygen with methane?  Of course not!  Just as a cross-cultural collaboration of humans can recognize that norms should be differently implemented in different cultures when conditions differ, so also will recognition of local conditions be part of the hypothetical group's informed reflection concerning the norms on Earth.  Our diverse group of intelligent alien reasoners will see the value of contextually relativized norms: On Earth, it's good not to let things get too hot or too cold.  On Earth, it's good for the atmosphere to have more oxygen than methane.  On Earth, given local biology and our cognitive capacities, such-and-such communicative norms seem to work for humans and such-and-such others not to work.

Maybe some of these alien reasoners would be intractably jingoistic: Antareans are the best and should wipe out all other species!  It's a heinous moral crime to wear blue!  My thought is that in a diverse group of aliens, given plenty of time for reflection and discussion, and the full range of relevant information, such jingoistic ideas will overall tend to fare poorly with a broad audience.

I'm asking you to imagine a wide diversity of successfully cooperative alien (and possibly AI) species -- all of them intelligent, sophisticated, social, and long-lived -- looking at each other and at Earth, entering conversation with us, patiently gathering the information they need, and patiently ironing out their own disagreements in open dialogue.  I think they will tend to condemn the Holocaust and approve of feeding your children.  I think we can surmise this by thinking about what norms would tend to arise in general among developmentally expensive, behaviorally sophisticated social entities, and then considering how intelligent, thoughtful entities would apply those norms to the situation on Earth, given time and favorable conditions to reflect.  I propose that we think of an action as "ethical" or "unethical" to the extent it would tend to garner approval or disapproval under such hypothetical conditions.

It needn't follow that every act is determinately ethically good or bad, or that there's a correct scalar ranking of the ethical goodness or badness of actions.  There might be persistent disagreements even in these hypothesized circumstances.  Maybe there would be no overall tendency toward convergence in puzzle cases, or tragic dilemmas, or when important norms of approximately equal weight come into conflict.  It's actually, I submit, a strength of the alien convergence model that it permits us to make sense of such irresolvability.  (We can even imagine the degree of hypothetical convergence varying independently of goodness and badness.  About Action A, there might be almost perfect convergence on its being a little bit good.  About Action B, in contrast, there might be 80% convergence on its being extremely good.)

Note that, unlike many other naturalistic approaches that ground ethics specifically in human sensibilities, the metaethics of alien convergence is not fundamentally relativistic.  What is morally good depends not on what humans (or aliens) actually judge to be good but rather on what a hypothetical congress of socially sophisticated, developmentally expensive humans, post-humans, aliens, sufficiently advanced AI, and others of the right type would judge to be good.  At the same time, this metaethics avoids committing to the implausible claim that all rational agents (including short-lived, solitary ones) would tend to or rationally need to approve of what is morally good.

How the Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness Works

A few months ago on this blog, I presented a "Mimicry Argument" against robot consciousness -- or more precisely, an argument that aims to show why it's reasonable to doubt the consciousness of an AI that is built to mimic superficial features of human behavior.  Since then, my collaborator Jeremy Pober and I have presented this material to philosophy audiences in Sydney, Hamburg, Lisbon, Oxford, Krakow, and New York, and our thinking has advanced.

Our account of mimicry draws on work on mimicry in evolutionary biology.  On our account, a mimic is an entity:

• with a superficial feature (S2) that is selected or designed to resemble a superficial feature (S1) of some model entity
• for the sake of deceiving, delighting, or otherwise provoking a particular reaction in some particular audience or "receiver"
• because the receiver treats S1 in the model entity as an indicator of some underlying feature F.

Viceroy butterflies have wing coloration patterns (S2) that resemble the wing color patterns (S1) of monarch butterflies for the sake of misleading predators who treat S1 as an indicator of toxicity.  Parrots emit songs that resemble the songs or speech of other birds or human caretakers for social advantage.  If the receiver is another parrot, the song in the model (but not necessarily the mimic) indicates group membership.  If the receiver is a human, the speech in the model (but not necessarily the mimic) indicates linguistic understanding.  As the parrot case illustrates, not all mimicry needs to be deceptive, and the mimic might or might not possess the feature the receiver attributes.

Here's the idea in a figure:

Pober and I define a "consciousness mimic" as an entity whose S2 resembles an S1 that, in the model entity, normally indicates consciousness.  So, for example, a toy which says "hello" when powered on is a consciousness mimic: For the sake of a receiver (a child), it has a superficial feature (S2, the sound "hello" from its speakers) which resembles a superficial feature (S1) in an English speaking human which normally indicates consciousness (since humans who say "hello" are normally conscious).

Arguably, Large Language Models like ChatGPT are consciousness mimics in this sense.  They emit strings of text modeled on human-produced text for the sake of users who interpret that text as having semantic content of the same sort such text normally does when emitted by conscious humans.

Now, if something is a consciousness mimic, we can't straightforwardly infer its consciousness from its possession of S2 in the same way we can normally infer the model's consciousness from its presence in S1.  The "hello" toy isn't conscious.  And if ChatGPT is conscious, that will require substantial argument to establish; it can't be inferred in the same ready way that we infer consciousness in a human from human utterances.

Let me attempt to formalize this a bit:

(1.) A system is a consciousness mimic if:

a. It possesses superficial features (S2) that resemble the superficial features (S1) of a model entity.

b. In the model entity, the possession of S1 normally indicates consciousness.

c. The best explanation of why the mimic possesses S2 is the mimicry relationship described above.

(2.) Robots or AI systems – at least an important class of them – are consciousness mimics in this sense.

(3.) Because of (1c), if a system is a consciousness mimic, inference to the best explanation does not permit inferring consciousness from its possession of S2.

(4.) Some other argument might justify attributing consciousness to the mimic; but if the mimic is a robot or AI system, any such argument, for the foreseeable future, will be highly contentious.

(5.) Therefore, we are not justified in attributing consciousness to the mimic.

AI systems designed with outputs that look human might understandably tempt users to attribute consciousness based on those superficial features, but we should be cautious about such attributions.  The inner workings of Large Language Models and other AI systems are causally complex and designed to generate outputs that look like the types of outputs humans produce, for the sake of being interpretable by humans; but not all causal complexity implies consciousness and the superficial resemblance to the behaviorally sophisticated patterns we associate with consciousness could be misleading if such patterns could potentially arise without the presence of consciousness.

The main claim is intended to be weak and uncontroversial: When the mimicry structure is present, significant further argument is required before attributing consciousness to an AI system based on superficial features suggestive of consciousness.

Friends of robot or AI consciousness may note two routes by which to escape the Mimicry Argument.  They might argue, contra premise (2), that some important target types of artificial systems are not consciousness mimics.  Or they might present an argument that the target system, despite being a consciousness mimic, is also genuinely conscious – an argument they believe is uncontentious (contra 4) or that justifies attributing consciousness despite being contentious (contra the inference from 4 to 5).

The Mimicry Argument is not meant to apply universally to all robots and AI systems.  Its value, rather, is to clarify the assumptions implicit in arguments against AI consciousness on the grounds that AI systems merely mimic the superficial signs of consciousness.  We can then better see both the merits of that type of argument and means of resisting it.

Color the World

My teenage daughter's car earns a lot of attention on the street:

People honk and wave, strangers ask to add their own art, five-year-olds drop their toys and gawk.  A few people look annoyed and turn away.  (Kate describes her car as a "personality tester".)

A couple of years ago, I had promised my 2009 Honda Accord to Kate when she earned her driver's license.  But knowing that Kate cares about appearances -- stylish clothes and all that -- I promised that I'd have it repainted first, since the paint jobs on these old Hondas age badly in the southern California sun.  But when I saw the cost of a proper paint job, I was shocked.  So I suggested that we turn it into an art car, which she and her friends could decorate at will.  (In the 1980s, a few of my friends and I did the same with our old beater cars, generating "Motorized Cathedrals of the Church of the Mystical Anarchist" numbers 2 through 4 -- number 1, of course, being Earth itself.)  She accepted my offer, we bought paints, and voila, over the months the art has accumulated!

I'm not sure exactly what makes the world intrinsically valuable.  I reject hedonism, on which the only intrinsically valuable thing is pleasure; I'm inclined to think that a diversity of flourishing life is at least as important.  (Consider what one would benevolently hope for on a distant planet.  I'd hope not that it's just a sterile rock, but richly populated with diverse life, including, ideally, rich societies with art, science, philosophy, sports, and varied cultures and ecosystems.)

Multitudinous brown 2009 Honda Accords populate the roads of America.  What a bland, practical car!  The world is richer -- intrinsically better -- for containing Kate's weird variant.  She and her friends have added color to the world.

We might generalize this to a motto: Color the World.

It doesn't have to be a car, of course.  Your creative uniqueness might more naturally manifest in other forms (and it's reasonable to worry about resale value).  It might be tattoos on your body, unusual clothing, the way you decorate your office, house, or yard.  It might be your poetry (even secret poetry, seen by no one else and immediately destroyed, timelessly enriches the fabric of the world), your music, your philosophical prose, your distinctive weirdness on social media.  It might be the unusual way you greet people, your quirky manifestation of the rituals of religion or fandom or parenthood, your taste in metaphor, the way you skip down the street, your puns and dad jokes, your famous barbecue parties.

It would be superhuman to be distinctively interesting in all these domains at once, and probably narcissistic even to try.  Sometimes it's best to be the straight man in boring clothes -- a contrast against which the dazzlingly dressed shine more brightly.  But I think most of us hold back more than we need to, for lack of energy and fear of standing out.  Hoist your freak flag!

I see three dimensions of excellence in coloring the world:

(1.) Your color must be different than the others around you, in a way that stands out, at least to the attentive.  If everyone has a brown Honda, having the only green one already adds diversity, even if green is no intrinsically better than brown.  If baseball hats are abundant, adding another one to the mix doesn't add color; but being the one baseball hat in a sea of fedoras does (and vice versa of course).

(2.) Your color should ideally express something distinctive about you.  While you might choose a baseball hat to contrast with the fedoras simply because it's different, ideally you choose it because it also discloses an underlying difference between you and the others -- maybe you are the ragingest baseball fan in the group.  Your moon-and-cat tattoo isn't just different but manifests your special affection for cats in moonlight.  Your dad jokes wink with a je ne sais quoi that your friends all instantly recognize.

(3.) Your color should ideally arise from your creative energy.  A baseball cap from the merch store might (in some contexts) be color -- but a cap modified by your own hand is more colorful.  Let it be, if it can, your own artistic endeavor, your paint and brush, your own selection of words, your own decisions about how best to embody the ritual, organize the party, structure the space.  If it's prepackaged, put it together a little differently, or contextualize or use it a little differently.

Can I justify these subsidiary principles by appeal to the ideal of diversity?  Maybe!  Diversity occupies a middle space between bland sameness and chaotic white noise.  By grounding your difference in your distinctive features and your creative inspiration, you ensure the structure, order, and significance that distinguishes meaningful diversity from random variation.

I imagine someone objecting to Color the World by counterposing the motto Walk Lightly.  I do feel the pull of Walk Lightly.  Don't make a big fuss.  Let things be.  No need to scratch your name on every tree and upturn all the sand on the beach.  Walk Lightly, perhaps, manifests respect for the color that others bring to the world.  Fair enough.  Make good decisions about when and where to color.

Goodbye for today!  Time to drive my own bland car home.  When I walk in my front door, I'll ritualistically confirm with my wife and daughter that they abided by my usual morning advice to them: (1.) no barfing, and (2.) don't get abducted by aliens.

Is the World Morally Well Ordered? Secular Versions of the "Problem of Evil"

Since 2003, I've regularly taught a large lower-division class called "Evil", focusing primarily on the moral psychology of evil (recent syllabus here).  We conclude by discussing the theological "problem of evil" -- the question of whether and how evil and suffering are possible given an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent God.  Over the years I've been increasingly intrigued by a secular version of this question.

I see the secular "problem of evil" as this: Although no individual or collective has anything close to the knowledge or power of God as envisioned in mainstream theological treatments, the world is not wholly beyond our control; so there's at least some possibility that individuals and collectives can work toward making the world morally well ordered in the sense that the good thrive, the evil suffer, justice is done, and people get what they deserve.  So, how and to what extent is the world morally well ordered?  My aim today is to add structure to this question, rather than answer it.

(1.) We might first ask whether it would in fact be good if the world were morally well-ordered.  One theological response to the problem of evil is to argue no.  A world in which God ensured perfect moral order would be a world in which people lacked the freedom to make unwise choices, and freedom is so central to the value of human existence that it's overall better that we're free and suffer than that we're unfree but happy.

A secular analogue might be: A morally well-ordered world would, or might, require such severe impingements on our freedom as to not be worth the tradeoff.  It might, for example, require an authoritarian state that rewards, punishes, monitors, and controls in a manner that -- even if it could accurately sort the good from the bad -- fundamentally violates essential liberties.  Or it might require oppressively high levels of informal social control by peers and high-status individuals, detecting and calling out everyone's moral strengths and weaknesses.

(2.) Drawing from the literature on "immanent justice" -- with literary roots in, for example, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky -- we might consider plausible social and psychological mechanisms of moral order.  In Shakespeare's Macbeth, one foul deed breeds another and another -- partly to follow through on and cover up the first and partly because one grows accustomed to evil -- until the evil is so extreme and pervasive that the revulsion and condemnation of others becomes inevitable.  In Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov torments himself with fear, guilt, and loss of intimacy (since he has a life-altering secret he cannot share with most others in his life), until he unburdens himself with confession.

We can ask to what extent it's true that such social and psychological mechanisms cause the guilty to suffer.  Is it actually empirically correct that those who commit moral wrongs end up unhappy as a result of guilt, fear, social isolation, and the condemnation of others?  I read Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors as arguing the contrary, portraying Judah as overall happier and better off as a result of murdering his mistress.

(3.) Drawing from the literature on the goodness or badness of "human nature", we can ask to what extent people are naturally pleased by their own and others' good acts and revolted by their own and others' evil.  I find the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi especially interesting on this point.  Although Mengzi acknowledges that the world isn't perfectly morally ordered ("an intent noble does not forget he may end up in a ditch; a courageous noble does not forget he may lose his head"; 3B1), he generally portrays the morally good person as happy, pleased by their own choices, and admired by others -- and he argues that our inborn natures inevitably tend this direction if we are not exposed to bad environmental pressures.

(4.) We can explore the extent to which moral order is socially and culturally contingent.  It is plausible that in toxic regimes (e.g., Stalinist Russia) the moral order is to some extent inverted, the wicked thriving and the good suffering.  We can aspire to live in a society where, in general -- not perfectly, of course! -- moral goodness pays off, perhaps through ordinary informal social mechanisms: "What goes around comes around."  We can consider what structures tend to ensure, and what structures tend to pervert, moral order.

Then, knowing this -- within the constraints of freedom and given legitimate diversity of moral opinion (and the lack of any prospect for a reliable moralometer) -- we can explore what we as individuals, or as a group, might do to help create a morally better ordered world.

[Dall-E interpretation of a moralometer sorting angels and devils, punishing the devils and rewarding the angels]

Conscious Subjects Needn't Be Determinately Countable: Generalizing Dennett's Fame in the Brain

It is, I suspect, an accident of vertebrate biology that conscious subjects typically come in neat, determinate bundles -- one per vertebrate body, with no overlap.  Things might be very different with less neurophysiologically unified octopuses, garden snails, split-brain patients, craniopagus twins, hypothetical conscious computer systems, and maybe some people with "multiple personality" or dissociative identity.

Consider whether the following two principles are true:

Transitivity of Unity: If experience A and experience B are each part of the conscious experience of a single subject at a single time, and if experience B and experience C are each part of the conscious experience of a single subject at a single time, then experience A and experience C are each part of the conscious experience of a single subject at a single time.

Discrete Countability: Except in marginal cases at spatial and temporal boundaries (e.g., someone crossing a threshold into a room), in any spatiotemporal region the number of conscious subjects is always a whole number (0, 1, 2, 3, 4...) -- never a fraction, a negative number, an imaginary number, an indeterminate number, etc.

Leading scientific theories of consciousness, such as Global Workspace Theory and Integrated Information Theory are architecturally committed to neat bundles satisfying transitivity of unity and discrete countability.  Global Workspace Theories treat processes as conscious if they are available to, or represented in, "the" global workspace (one per conscious animal).  Integrated Information Theory contains an "exclusion postulate" according to which conscious systems cannot nest or overlap, and has no way to model partial subjects or indiscrete systems.  Most philosophical accounts of the "unity of consciousness" (e.g. Bayne 2010) also invite commitment to these two theses.

In contrast, Dennett's "fame in the brain" model of consciousness -- though a close kin to global workspace views -- is compatible with denying transitivity of unity and discrete countability.  In Dennett's model, a cognitive process or content is conscious if it is sufficiently "famous" or influential among other cognitive processes.  For example, if you're paying close attention to a sharp pain in your toe, the pain process will influence your verbal reports ("that hurts!"), your practical reasoning ("I'd better not kick the wall again"), your planned movements (you'll hobble to protect it), and so on; and conversely, if a slight movement in peripheral vision causes a bit of a response in your visual areas, but you don't and wouldn't report it, act on it, think about it, or do anything differently as a result, it is nonconscious.  Fame comes in degrees.  Something can be famous to different extents among different groups.  And there needn't even be a determinately best way of clustering and counting groups.

[Dall-E's interpretation of a "brain with many processes, some of which are famous"]

Here's a simple model of degrees of fame:

Imagine a million people.  Each person has a unique identifier (a number 1-1,000,000), a current state (say, a "temperature" from -10 to +10), and the capacity to represent the states of ten other people (ten ordered pairs, each containing the identifier and temperature of one other person).

If there is one person whose state is represented in every other person, then that person is maximally famous (a fame score of 999,999).  If there is one person whose state is represented in no other person, that that person has zero fame.  Between these extremes is of course a smooth gradation of cases.

If we analogize to cognitive processes we might imagine the pain in the toe or the flicker in the periphery being just a little famous: Maybe the pain can affect motor planning but not speech, causes a facial expression but doesn't influence the stream of thought you're having about lunch.  Maybe the flicker guides a glance and causes a spike of anxiety but has no further downstream effects.  Maybe they're briefly reportable but not actually reported, and they have no impact on medium- or long-term memory, or they affect some sorts of memory but not others.

The "ignition" claim of global workspace theory is the empirically defensible (but not decisively established) assertion that there are few such cases of partial fame: Either a cognitive process has very limited effects outside of its functional region or it "ignites" across the whole brain, becoming widely accessible to the full range of influenceable processes.  The fame-in-the-brain model enables a different way of thinking that might apply to a wider range of cognitive architectures.

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We might also extend the fame model to issues of unity and the individuation of conscious subjects.

Start with a simple case: the same setup as before, but with two million people and the following constraint: Processes numbered 1 to 1,000,000 can only represent the states of other processes in that same group of 1 to 1,000,000; and processes numbered 1,000,001 to 2,000,000 can only represent the states of other processes in that group.  The fame groups are disjoint, as if on different planets.  Adapted to the case of experiences: Only you can feel your pain and see your peripheral flicker (if anyone does), and only I can feel my pain and see my peripheral flicker (if anyone does).

This disjointedness is what makes the two conscious subjects distinct from each other.  But of course, we can imagine less disjointedness.  If we eliminate disjointedness entirely, so that processes numbered 1 to 2,000,000 can each represent the states of any process from 1 to 2,000,000, then our two subjects become one.  The planets are entirely networked together.  But partial disjointedness is also possible: Maybe processes can represent the states of anyone within 1,000,000 of their own number (call this the Within a Million case).  Or maybe processes numbered 950,001 to 1,050,000 can be represented by any process from 1 to 2,000,000 but every process below 950,001 can only be represented by processes 1 to 1,050,000 and every process above 1,050,000 can only be represented by processes 950,001 to 2,000,000 (call this the Overlap case).

The Overlap case might be thought of as two discrete subjects with an overlapping part.  Subject A (1 to 1,050,000) and Subject B (950,001 to 2,000,000) each have their private experiences, but there are also some shared experiences (whenever processes 950,001 to 1,050,000 become sufficiently famous in the range constituting each subject).  Transitivity of Unity thus fails: Subject A experiences, say, a taste of a cookie (process 312,421 becoming famous across processes 1 - 1,050,000) and simultaneously a sound of a bell (process 1,000,020 becoming famous across processes 1 - 1,050,000); while Subject B experiences that same sound of a bell alongside the sight of an airplane (both of those processes being famous across processes 950,001 - 2,000,000).  Cookie and bell are unified in A.  Bell and airplane are unified in B.  But no subject experiences the cookie and airplane simultaneously.

In the Overlap case, discrete countability is arguably preserved, since it's plausible to say there are exactly two subjects of experience.  But it's more difficult to retain Discrete Countability in the Within a Million case.  There, if we want to count each distinct fame group as a separate subject, we will end up with a million different subjects: Subject 1 (1 to 1,000,001), Subject 2 (1 to 1,000,002), Subject 3 (1 to 1,000,003) ... Subject 1,000,001 (1 to 2,000,000), Subject 1,000,002 (2 to 2,000,000), ... Subject 1,999,999 (999,999 to 2,000,000), Subject 2,000,000 (1,000,000 - 2,000,000).  (There needn't be a middle subject with access to every process: Simply extend the case up to 3,000,000 processes.)  While we could say there would be two million discrete subjects in such an architecture, I see at least three infelicities:

First, person 1,000,002 might never be famous -- maybe even could never be famous, being just a low-level consumer whose destiny is to only to make others famous.  If so, Subject 1 and Subject 2 would always have, perhaps even necessarily would always have, exactly the same experiences in almost exactly the same physical substrate, despite being, supposedly, discrete subjects.  That is, at least, a bit of an odd result.

Second, it becomes too easy to multiply subjects.  You might have thought, based on the other cases, that a million processes is what it takes to generate a human subject, and that with two million processes you get either two human subjects or one large subject.  But now it seems that, simply by linking those two million processes together by a different principle (with about 1.5 times as many total connections), you can generate not just two but a full two million human subjects.  It turns out to be surprisingly cheap to create a plethora of discretely different subjective centers of experience.

Third, the model I've presented is simplified in a certain way: It assumes that there are two million discrete, countable processes that could potentially be famous or create fame in others by representing them.  But cognitive processes might not in fact be discrete and countable in this way.  They might be more like swirls and eddies in a turbulent stream, and every attempt to give them sharp boundaries and distinct labels might to some extent be only a simplified model of a messy continuum.  If so, then our two million discrete subjects would itself be a simplified model of a messy continuum of overlapping subjectivities.

The Within a Million case then, might be best conceptualized not as a case of one subject of experience, nor two, nor two million, but rather a case that defies any such simple numerical description, contra Discrete Countability.

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This is abstract and far-fetched, of course.  But once we have stretched our minds in this way, it becomes, I think, easier to conceive of the possibility that some real cases (cognitively partly disunified mollusks, for example, or people with unusual conditions or brain structures, or future conscious computer systems) might defy transitivity of unity and discrete countability.

What would it be like to be such an entity / pair of entities / diffuse-bordered-uncountable-groupish thing?  Unsurprisingly, we might find such forms of consciousness difficult to imagine with our ordinary vertebrate concepts and philosophical tools derived from our particular psychology.

The Meta-Epistemic Objection to Longtermism

According to "longtermism" (as I'll use the term), our thinking should be significantly influenced by our expectations for the billion-plus-year future.  In a paper in draft, I argue, to the contrary, that our thinking should be not at all influenced by our expectations for the billion-year-plus future.  Every action has so vastly many possible positive and negative future consequences that it's impossible to be justified in expecting that any action currently available to us will have a non-negligible positive impact that far into the future.  Last week, I presented my arguments against longtermism to Oxford's Global Priorities Institute, the main academic center of longtermist thinking.

The GPI folks were delightfully welcoming and tolerant of my critiques, and they are collectively nuanced enough in their thinking to already have anticipated the general form of all of my main concerns in various places in print.  What became vivid for me in discussion was the extent to which my final negative conclusion about longtermist reasoning depends on a certain meta-epistemic objection -- that is, the idea that our guesses about the good or bad consequences of our actions for the billion-year-plus future are so poorly grounded that we are epistemically better off not even guessing.

The contrary position, seemingly held by several of the audience members at GPI, is that, sure, we should be very epistemically humble when trying to estimate good or bad consequences for the billion-year-plus future -- but still we might find ourselves, after discounting for our likely overconfidence and lack of imagination, modestly weighing up all the uncertainties and still judging that action A really would be better than action B in the billion-plus-year future; and then it's perfectly reasonable to act on this appropriately humble, appropriately discounted judgment.

They are saying, essentially, play the game carefully.  I'm saying don't play the game.  So why do I think it's better not even to play the game?  I see three main reasons.

[image of A minus delta < B plus delta, overlaid with a red circle and crossout line]

First, longtermist reasoning requires cognitive effort.  If the expected benefit of longtermist reasoning is (as I suggest in one estimate in the full-length essay draft) one quadrillionth of a life, it might not be worth a millisecond of cognitive effort to try to get the decision right.  One's cognitive resources would be better expended elsewhere.

Now one response to this -- a good response, I think, at least for a certain range of thinkers in a certain range of contexts -- is that reflecting about the very distant future is fun, engaging, mind-opening, and even just intrinsically worthwhile.  I certainly wouldn't want to shame anyone just for thinking about it!  (Among other things, I'm a fan of science fiction.)  But I do think we should bear the cost argument in mind to the extent our aim is the efficient use of cognitive labor for improving the world.  It's likely that there are many more productive topics to throw your cognitive energies at, if you want to positively influence the future -- including, I suspect, just being more thoughtful about the well-being of people in your immediate neighborhood.

Second, longtermist reasoning adds noise and error into the decision-making process.  Suppose that when considering the consequences of action A vs. action B for "only" the next thousand years, you come to the conclusion that action A would be better.  But then, upon further reflection, you conclude -- cautiously, with substantial epistemic discounting -- that looking over the full extent of the next billion-plus years, B in fact has better expected consequences.  The play carefully and don't play approaches now yield different verdicts about what you should do.  Play carefully says B.  Don't play says A.  Which is likely to be the better policy, as a general matter?  Which is likely to lead to better decisions and consequences overall, across time?

Let's start with an unflattering analogy.  I'll temper it in a minute.  Suppose that you favor action A over action B on ordinary evidential grounds, but then after summing all those up, you make the further move of consulting a horoscope.  Assuming horoscopes have zero evidential value, the horoscope adds only noise and error to the process.  If the horoscope "confirms" A, then your decision is the same as it would have been.  If the horoscope ends up tilting you toward B, then it has led you away from your best estimate.  It's better, of course, for the horoscope to play no role.

Now what if the horoscope -- or, to put it more neutrally, Process X -- adds a tiny bit of evidential value -- say, one trillionth of the value of a happy human life?  That is, suppose that if the Process X says "Action B will increase good outcomes by trillions of lives".  You then discount the output of Process X a lot -- maybe by 24 orders of magnitude.  After this discounting of its evidentiary value, you consequently increase your estimate of the value of Action B by one trillionth of a life.  In that case, almost no practical decisions which involve the complex weighing up of competing costs and benefits should be such that the tiny Process X difference is sufficient to rationally shift you from choosing A to choosing B.  You would probably be better off thinking a bit more carefully about other pros and cons.  Furthermore, I suspect that -- as a contingent matter of human psychology -- it will be very difficult to give Process X only the tiny, tiny weight it deserves.  Once you've paid the cognitive costs of thinking through Process X, that factor will loom salient for you and be more than a minuscule influence on your reasoning.  As a result, incorporating Process X into your reasoning will add noise and error, of a similar sort to the pure horoscope case, even if it has some tiny predictive value.

Third, longtermist reasoning might have negative effects on other aspects of one’s cognitive life, for example, by encouraging inegalitarian or authoritarian fantasies, or a harmful neo-liberal quantification of goods, or self-indulgent rationalization, or a style of consequentialist thinking that undervalues social relationships or already suffering people.  This is of course highly speculative and contingent both on the contingent psychology of the longtermists in question and the value or disvalue of, for example, "neo-liberal quantification of goods".  But in general cognitive complexity is fertile soil for cognitive vice.  Perhaps rationalization is most straightforward version of this objection: If you are emotionally attracted to Action B -- if you want it to be the case that B is the best choice -- and if billion-year-plus thinking seems to favor Action B, it's plausible that you'll give that fact more than the minuscule-upon-minuscule weight it deserves (if my other arguments concerning longtermism are correct).

Now it might be the case that longtermist reasoning also has positive effects on the longtermist thinker -- for example, by encouraging sympathy for distant others, or by fruitfully encouraging more two-hundred-year thinking, or by encouraging a flexible openness of mind.  This is, I think, pretty hard to know; but longtermists' self-evaluations and peer evaluations are probably not a reliable source here.

[Thanks to all the GPI folks for comments and discussion, especially Christian Tarsney.]

Two-Layer Metaphysics: Reconciling Dispositionalism about Belief with Underlying Representational Architecture

During the question period following UCR visiting scholar Brice Bantegnie's colloquium talk on dispositional approaches to the mind, one of my colleagues remarked -- teasingly, but also with some seriousness -- "one thing I don't like about you dispositionalists is that you deny cognitive science".  Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum express a similar thought in their 2018 critique of dispositionalism: Cognitive science works in the medium of representations.  Therefore (?), belief must be a representational state.  Therefore (?), defining belief wholly in terms of dispositional structures conflicts with the best cognitive science.

None of this is correct.  We can understand why not through what I'll call two-layer metaphysics.  Jeremy Pober's 2022 dissertation under my direction was in part about two-layer metaphysics.  Bantegnie also supports a type of two-layer metaphysics, though he and Pober otherwise have very different metaphysical pictures.  (Pober is biological reductionist and Bantegnie a Ryle-inspired dispositionalist.)  Mandelbaum and I in conversation have also converged on this, recognizing that we can partly reconcile our views in this way.

Two-layer metaphysics emphasizes the distinction between (to somewhat misappropriate David Marr) the algorithmic and the implementational level, or alternatively between conceptual and nomological necessities, or between role and realizer, or between what makes it correct to say that someone believes some particular proposition and in virtue of what particular structures they actually do believe that proposition.  (These aren't equivalent formulations, but species of a genre.)

To get a clearer sense of this, it's helpful to consider space aliens.

Rudolfo, let's say, is an alien visitor from Alpha Centauri.  He arrives in a space ship, quickly learns English, Chinese, and Esperanto, tells amusing stories about his home world illustrated with slide shows and artifacts, enjoys eating oak trees whole and taking naps at the bottom of lakes, becomes a 49ers football fan, and finds employment as a tax attorney.  To all outward appearances, he integrates seamlessly into U.S. society; and although he's a bit strange in some ways, Rudolfo is perfectly comprehensible to us.  Let's also stipulate (though it's a separate issue) that he has all the kinds of conscious experiences you would expect: Feelings of joy and sadness, sensory images, conscious thoughts, and so on.

[Dall-E image of an alien filling out tax forms]

Does Rudolfo believe that taxes are due on April 15?  On a dispositionalist account of the sort I favor, as long as he stably possesses all the right sorts of dispositions, he does.  He is disposed to correctly file tax forms by that deadline.  He utters sentences like "Taxes are due on April 15", and he feels sincere when he says this.  He feels anxiety if a client risks missing that deadline.  If he learns that someone submitted their taxes on April 1, he concludes that they did not miss the deadline, etc.  He has the full suite of appropriate behavioral, experiential, and cognitive dispositions.  (By "cognitive dispositions" I mean dispositions to enter into other related mental states, like the disposition to draw relevant conclusions.)

Knowing all this, we know Rudolfo believes.  Do we also need to dissect him, or put him in some kind of scanner, or submit him to subtle behavioral tests concerning details of reaction time and such, to figure out whether he has the right kind of underlying architecture?  Here, someone committed to identifying belief in a strict way with the possession of a certain underlying architecture faces a dilemma.  Either they say no, no dissection, scan, or subtle cognitive testing is needed, or they say yes, a dissection, scan, or series of subtle cognitive tests is needed.

If no, then the architectural commitment is vacuous: It turns out that having the right set of dispositions is sufficient for having the right architecture.  So one might as well be a dispositionalist after all.

If yes, then we don't really know whether Rudolfo believes despite the behavioral and experiential patterns that would seem to be sufficient for believing.  This conclusion (1.) violates common sense and ordinary usage, and (2.) misses what we do and should care about in belief ascription.  If a hardcore cognitive realist were to say "nope, wrong architecture! that species has no beliefs!", we'd just have to invent a new word for what Rudolfo and his kind share in common with humans when we act and react in such patterns -- maybe belief*.  Rudolfo believes* that taxes are due on April 15.  That's why he's working so hard and reminding his clients.  But then "belief*" is the more useful term, as well as the more commonsensical, and it's probably what we meant, or should have meant, by "belief" all along.

Now it might be that in humans, or in Alpha Centaurians, or in some other Earthly or alien species, belief works by means of manipulating internal representations written in the language of thought.  That could be!  (I have my doubts, unless the view is given a very weak formulation.)  But even if we allow that possibility, the reason that having that architecture counts as believing is because that architecture, in that species, happens to be the architecture that underwrites the dispositional pattern.

There are, then, so to speak, two layers here.  There's the dispositional characterization, which, if an entity matches it well enough, makes it true to describe them as someone who believes.  And then there's the underlying subpersonal architecture, which is how the belief is implemented in them at the detailed cognitive level.

Thus, my dissatisfied colleague, and Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum, are wrong: There is no conflict between a dispositional approach to belief and representationalist realism in cognitive science.  The metaphysical dispositionalist and the psychological representationalist are engaged in different tasks, and both can be correct -- or rather, both can be correct unless the representationalist also attempts the dispositionalist's broader metaphysical task (in which case they face the Rudolfo dilemma).

Does this make dispositionalism unscientific?  Not at all!  Two comparisons.  Personality traits: These can be defined dispositionally.  To be an extravert is nothing more or less than to have a certain dispositional profile -- that is, to tend to act and react in characteristically extraverted ways.  There can still be a science of dispositional profiles (most of personality psychology, I'd say); and there can also be a science of implementation (e.g., what subpersonal brain or lower-level cognitive structures explain the extravert's energy and sociality?).  Evolution: At a broad theoretical level, evolution just requires heritable traits with different rates of reproductive success.  At a lower level, we can look at genes as the architectural implementation.  One can work on the science of evolution at either layer or with an eye on both layers at once.