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

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

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

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

As always, thoughts and comments welcome.

Chinese Room Persona

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

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

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

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

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

New Data on The Generosity of Philosophy Students

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

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

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

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

The five least charitable were:

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

These numbers compare with a 14% donation rate overall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moral Order and Happiness in Fiction

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

What would the message of such a play be?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do We Go from Here? Some Final Thoughts

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

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

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

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

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

Why Tononi Should Allow That Conscious Entities Can Have Conscious Parts

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

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

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

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

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

The Armchair and the Lab Throne

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth Barcan Marcus Memorial Celebration

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

Betelgeusian Beeheads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Large Print Sayeth the Small Print Denieth

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Things Not to Do

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

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

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

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

What to Write

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

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

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

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

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

Tailoring Statements to Particular Programs

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

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

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

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

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

Explaining Weaknesses in Your File

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

Statements of Personal History

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

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

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

***

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

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

Can a Rat Walk Down "Memory" Lane?

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

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

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

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

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

On the Epistemic Status of Deathbed Regrets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Annual "Experiment Month" Initiative

Deadline for submissions June 15th.

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

Here are some of last year's results.

More info here.

Twilight of the (Scientific) Gods?

(by guest blogger Carrie Figdor)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grounds for Dream Skepticism

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

Trudeau obliges. The key panels:

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

The same reasoning might apply if things are implausibly hellish.

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

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

Martian Rabbit Superorganisms, Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Revised May 5]

Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Milgram, and King Xuan of Qi

Perhaps my favorite Mencius passage is 1A7.  At its core is a story of a king's mercy on an ox.

While the king was sitting up in his hall, an ox was led past below. The king saw it and said, "Where is the ox going?" Hu He replied, "We are about to ritually anoint a bell with its blood." The king said, "Spare it. I cannot bear its frightened appearance, like an innocent going to the execution ground." Hu He replied, "So should we dispense with the anointing of the bell?" The king said, "How can that be dispensed with? Exchange it for a sheep." (Van Norden, trans.)

Mencius asks the king (King Xuan of Qi):

If Your Majesty was pained at its being innocent and going to the execution ground, then was is there to choose between an ox and a sheep?... You saw the ox but had not seen the sheep.  Gentlemen cannot bear to see animals die if they have seen them living. If they hear the cries of their suffering, they cannot bear to eat their flesh. Hence, gentlemen keep their distance from the kitchen.

(Note that Mencius does not conclude that gentlemen should become vegetarians.  Interesting possibilities for reflection arise regarding butchers, executioners, soldiers, etc., but let's not dally.)  To understand the next part of the passage, you need to know what kind of person this king was.  Skip forward to passage 1B11 where Mencius says to King Xuan:

Yan was ferocious to its people. Your Majesty went out and attacked it. The people thought that You were going to deliver them as from flood and fire. They welcomed Your Majesty with baskets and food and pots of soup. But if You kill their fathers and older brothers, put burdens on [enslave? capture? take hostage?] their sons and younger brothers, destroy their shrines and temples, plundering their valuable goods -- how could that be acceptable?

The invasion of Yan probably occurred after his sparing of the ox, but it reveals King Xuan's character: He has mercy on an ox because the ox looks like an innocent person, but at the same time he is perfectly willing to kill innocent people.  Now back to 1A7.  Mencius says to the king:

Suppose there were someone who reported to Your Majesty, 'My strength is sufficient to life five hundred pounds, but not sufficient to lift one feather. My eyesight is sufficient to examine the tip of an autumn hair, but I cannot see a wagon of firewood.... In the present case your kindness is sufficient to reach animals, but the effects do not reach the commoners.... Measure it, and then you will distinguish the long and the short. Things are all like this, the heart most of all. Let Your Majesty measure it.

I can't read Hannah Arendt's famous portrayal of Adolf Eichmann without thinking of this passage from Mencius.  Eichmann (at least in Arendt's portrayal) respects and values his Jewish acquaintances, friends, and relatives -- even at one point has a Jewish lover.  When he goes east to see the killing operations, he finds it morally horrible and can't bear to look.  Yet he masterfully shipped hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in the Holocaust.  Near the end, Eichmann even defied Himmler's order to stop having Jews killed, since he knew Himmler's order would be contrary to Hitler's wish.  Like King Xuan of Qi, Eichmann is merciful and soft (perhaps too soft) to those he sees, while indifferent to those outside his field of view, failing to note the similarity between the cases -- failing to "measure his heart".

You have probably heard of the Milgram experiment.  What most people remember about it is that it was amazingly easy for Stanley Milgram to convince research subjects to deliver high-voltage, maybe even fatal, shocks to another research subject.  (All shocks were actually faked.)  What some people forget, but what Milgram himself emphasizes, is that people's obedience to instructions to deliver high-voltage shocks was very much contingent on the relative distances of the victim and of the authority issuing the instructions.  If the victim was near at hand and the authority far away, almost no one complied.  If the authority was nearby and the victim neither visible nor audible, almost everyone complied.

King Xuan and Eichmann would presumably be the perfect Milgram subjects.

Think and you will get it, Mencius says.  Take the heart that is over here and apply it over there.  Note how you react in the nearby, vivid cases; then note, intellectually, the lack of relevant difference between those cases and more distant, less vivid cases. For Mencius, this attention to the natural impulses of the heart, and the rational extension of those impulses, is the key to moral development.

Worth noting in conclusion: It's not all about extending impulses of sympathy or pity, as in 1A7 (and in some recent accounts of moral development).  Mencius holds that one can also notice and intellectually extend respect, ritual propriety, and uprightness (3A5, 6A10, 7A15, 7B31).

Bleg: Statements of Purpose / Personal Statements

I'm planning to update my series on applying to PhD programs in philosophy.  One thing I'd like to do is display some actual statements of purpose (also known as personal statements) from successful applicants, so that future applicants can see what these things really look like at full length.  Thus, I'm hoping that some readers will be willing to send me their past statements of purpose for this use.

If you're willing to help out, please email me (eschwitz at domain: ucr.edu) the following:
(1.) your statement of purpose;
(2.) the academic year in which you used it;
(3.) what schools you were admitted to (not just where you accepted but your full range of admittances);
(4.) whether you want me to list your name and link to your homepage (anonymous is fine if you prefer, but I also want to give credit where it's due).

I'll select a few statements to post on the Underblog and link to from the main blog when I update the PhD application series.  I'll aim to display a few different flavors, to give readers a sense of the range of statement types.  Selection criteria will include: recency (past 5 years preferable), success of application (elite schools nice but not necessary), and my sense of the statement's quality, representativeness, and difference from other selected statements.

Thank you for your awesomeness!

How Much Should You Care about How You Feel in Your Dreams?

Psychological hedonists say that people are motivated mainly or exclusively by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of displeasure or pain. Normative hedonists say that what we should be mainly or exclusively concerned about in our actions is maximizing our own and others' pleasure and minimizing our own and others' displeasure. Both types of hedonism have fallen on hard times since the days of Jeremy Bentham. Still, it might seem that hedonism isn't grossly wrong: Pleasure and displeasure are crucial motivators, and increasing pleasure and reducing displeasure should be a major part of living wisely and of structuring a good society.

Now consider dreams. Often a dream is the most pleasant or unpleasant thing that occurs all day. Discovering that you can fly, whee! How much do you do in waking life that's as fun as that? Conversely, how many things in waking life are as unpleasant as a nightmare? Here's a great opportunity, then, to advance the hedonistic project! Whatever you can do to improve the ratio of pleasant to unpleasant dreams should have a big impact on the balance of pleasure vs. displeasure in your life.

This fact, naturally, explains the huge emphasis utilitarian ethicists have placed on improving one's dream life. It also explains why companies offering dream-improvement regimens make so much more money than those promising merely weight loss.

Not. Of course not! When I ask people how concerned they are about the overall hedonic balance of their dreams, their response is almost always "Meh". But if the overall sum of felt pleasure and displeasure is important -- even if it's not the whole of what makes life valuable -- shouldn't we take at least somewhat seriously the quality our dream lives?

Dreams are usually forgotten, but I'm not sure how much that matters. Most people forget most of their childhood, too, and within a week they forget almost everything that happened on any given day. That doesn't seem to make the hedonic quality of those events irrelevant. Your three-year-old may entirely forget her birthday party a year later, but you still want her to enjoy it, right? And anyway: We can easily work to remember our dreams if we want. Simply jotting down one's dreams in a diary hugely increases dream recall. So if recall were important, one could pursue a two-step regimen: First, work toward improving the hedonic quality of your dreams (maybe by learning lucid dreaming), and second, improve your dream memory. The total impact on the amount of remembered pleasure in your life would be enormous!

Robert Nozick famously argued against hedonism by saying that few people would choose the guaranteed pleasure one could get by plugging into an experience machine over the uncertain pleasures of real-life accomplishment. Nozickian experience machines don't really exist, of course, but dreams do, and, contra hedonism, our indifference about dreams suggests that Nozick is right: Few people value even the great pleasures and displeasures of dream life over the most meager of real-world accomplishments.

(I remember chatting with someone at the Pacific APA about this a couple weeks ago -- Stephen White, maybe? In the fog of memory, I can't recall exactly who it was or to what extent these thoughts originated from me as opposed to my interlocutor.  Apologies, then, if they're due!)

[Related post: On Not Seeking Pleasure Much.]

Steven Pinker: "Wow, How Awesome We Liberal Intellectuals Are!"

Okay, maybe that's not a direct quote.

There aren't many 700-page books I enjoy from beginning to end. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature was one. Pinker's sweep is impressive, his ability to angle in on the same issue in many ways, his knack for extracting central points from a morass of scholarship, his engagingly accessible but rigorous prose. He is a gifted scholar; his mind scintillates.

But the book also has a comfortable, self-congratulatory tone that leaves me uneasy. By "self-congratulatory" I don't mean that Pinker congratulates himself personally, but rather that he congratulates us -- us Western, highly educated, cosmopolitan liberals, with our broad, sober, rational sense of the world, with our far-reaching sympathies, with our ability to take the long view and to keep human vice in check.

One manifestation of this self-congratulation is how impressed Pinker seems to be that it has been almost seventy years since Europeans and North Americans have killed each other in war by the tens of millions. He calls this "the Long Peace", and he concludes Chapter 5 with the thought that "perhaps, at last, we're learning" to avoid war (p. 294). Credit for the Long Peace, in Pinker's view, goes to liberalism, democracy, "gentle commerce", rising levels of education, and the increasingly open exchange of ideas. The same forces for good also get credit for the "Rights Revolutions": minority rights, women's rights, gay rights, children's rights, and animal rights. The printing press, books, iPhones, university education, hooray! I love all those things too. But it makes me nervous to find myself praising my era above all other eras, my political system above all other political systems, and my types of contribution to society (books, education, technology, communication) as the foundation of all this excellent progress. I wish I could detect any hint of self-suspicious nervousness in Pinker.

Pinker concludes his chapter on the "Better Angels" -- on the sources of all our new peace and rights -- in praise of reason as the best and most dependable source of our progress. He argues that in the past hundred years our ability to think abstractly has risen enormously due to formal schooling, as revealed by massive improvements in people's performance on IQ tests (the Flynn Effect). And this increase in abstract reasoning capacity has, in turn, resulted in immense moral improvement. Men can now imagine much better what it's like to be a woman; white people can imagine what it's like to be black; adults can imagine what it's like to be children. Also, we can reason much better from abstract principles such as "all people are created equal" without being blinded by parochial bunk about the special destiny of our nation, etc. Pinker writes:

The other half of the sanity check is to ask whether our recent ancestors can really be considered to be morally retarded. The answer, I am prepared to argue, is yes. Though they were surely decent people with perfectly functioning brains, the collective moral sophistication of the culture in which they lived was as primitive by modern standards as their mineral spas and patent medicines are by the medical standards of today. Many of their beliefs can be considered not just monstrous but, in a very real sense, stupid. They would not stand up to intellectual scrutiny as being consistent with other values they claimed to hold, and they persisted only because the narrower intellectual spotlight of the day was not routinely shone on them (p. 658).

Parody: Come to Harvard, study with us, and become a moral genius!

Pinker describes empirical evidence for seven connections between abstract reasoning and moral virtue:

(1.) People with higher IQs commit fewer crimes.
(2.) People with higher IQs are more likely to cooperate in "Prisoner's Dilemma" experiments.
(3.) People with higher IQs are more likely to be liberals.
(4.) People with higher IQs are more likely to support economic policies, like free trade, that (Pinker argues) tend to lead to peace between nations.
(5.) Countries whose populace had higher IQs in the 1960s were found in one study to be more likely to have prosperity and democracy in the 1990s.
(6.) Another study found countries with better educated populations to be less likely to enter civil war.
(7.) Another study found that politicians who speak in more nuanced, complex manner are less likely to lead their countries into war.

All these connections are interesting, but I don't see a compelling case here for the power of formal schooling and intellectual thought about moral issues to transform moral morons into better angels. Although Pinker sometimes notes that the studies in question control for confounding factors like income, it is hard to control for all potential confounds, and there are certainly some confounds that leap to mind. Higher IQ, for example, in our society, seems to relate to greater opportunity to advance one's interests other than by criminal means. People with more schooling might also react differently to the situation of being brought into a laboratory and given a Prisoner's Dilemma game; for example, they might be inclined to game the situation at a higher level by cooperating mainly as a means of communicating their cooperative nature to the experimenter. (As a Prisoner's Dilemma subject in a Stanford experiment in the 1980s, I seem to remember choosing to cooperate for exactly this reason.) Etc.

My own research on the moral behavior of ethics professors might be interpreted as evidence against Pinker's thesis. If we're really interested in the effect of intellectual moral reflection on real-world moral behavior, the comparison of ethics professors versus non-ethicist philosophers and other professors is potentially revealing because ethicists and other groups of professors will be similar, overall, in amount of formal schooling and in overall ability at abstract thought. But plausibly, ethics professors will have, on average, devoted considerably more abstract reasoning to moral issues like charitable donation, vegetarianism, and the nature of interpersonal virtue, than non-ethicists will have. And I have consistently found that ethicists behave on average no morally better in such matters than do comparison groups of other professors.

Pinker seems to recognize the potential threat to his thesis from the not-especially-admirable behavior of intellectuals. Unfortunately, he offers no detailed response, saying only:

It's also important to note that [Pinker's hypothesis] is about the influence of rationality -- the level of abstract reasoning in society -- and not about the influence of intellectuals. Intellectuals, in the words of the writer Eric Hoffer, "cannot operate at room temperature." They are excited by daring opinions, clever theories, sweeping ideologies, and utopian visions of the kind that caused so much trouble during the 20th century. The kind of reason that expands moral sensibilities comes not from grand intellectual "systems" but from the exercise of logic, clarity, objectivity, and proportionality. These habits of mind are distributed unevenly across the population at any time, but the Flynn Effect lifts all boats, and so we might expect to see a tide of mini- and micro-enlightenments across elites and ordinary citizens alike.

I find it hard to see the merit in this response. It seems to be simultaneously a kind of self-flattery -- it's the kind of abstract moral and political reasoning that we intellectuals are so good at that generates moral enlightenment -- and a self-flattering moral excuse -- but don't expect us intellectuals to achieve much personal moral progress from our reasoning! We're too hot; we can't operate at room temperature! Take our intellectualist morals, please, our U.S. higher education, our professorial sense of right and wrong; treasure the moral improvements that flow from the formal schooling we provide; but don't expect us to exemplify the moral standards we impart to you.

No, no, it's not that bad. But I do wish that Pinker had worried more that it might be that bad.

On Whether the Job of an Ethicist Is Only to Theorize about Morality, Not to Be Moral

Over several studies, I've found that professional ethicists tend to behave no better than non-ethicists. Ethicists sometimes react to my work by saying "My job is to theorize about ethics, not to live the moral life." What should we make of this response?

First: I agree about the formal job description.

Second: If the idea is that an ethicist's professionally espoused moral views both are and should be entirely isolated from her personal life, that seems an odd position to endorse. Taken to its natural conclusion, it seems to imply that ethicists advocating vegetarianism should be expected to consume cheeseburgers at the same rate as does everyone else. We should resist that conclusion. Both normatively and descriptively, we should expect Peter Singer to live at least approximately the vegetarianism he so passionately advocates. Analogously, if not quite as starkly, it seems reasonable to expect those Kantians who think that lying is particularly heinous to lie a bit less, on average, than do other people, and to expect Confucians who see filial duty as important to be a bit more attentive to their parents, and to expect consequentialists who emphasize the huge importance of donating to famine relief to donate a bit more to famine relief than do other people. Sainthood would be too much expect. But some movement to harmonize one's life and one's moral theories seems both normatively appropriate and descriptively likely, at least on the face of it.

Third: Ethicists seem, on average, to espouse somewhat more stringent moral views than do non-ethicists. For example, ethicists seem to be more likely than non-ethicists to say it's morally bad to eat meat, and on average they seem to think that people should donate more to charity than non-ethicists seem to think people should donate. (See here.) Unless there is some countervailing force, then, movements to harmonize normative attitude and real-world behavior ought to lead ethicists, on average, to regulate their moral behavior a bit more stringently than do non-ethicists. The problem is that this doesn't seem empirically to be the case. For example, although Josh Rust and I found 60% of ethicists to describe "regularly eating the meat of mammals such as beef and pork" as morally bad, compared to 45% of other philosophers and only 19% of professors in other departments, when asked if they had eaten meat at their previous evening meal, we found no statistically significant difference among the three groups.

Fourth: So we might consider some countervailing forces. One possibility is that there's some kind of "moral licensing" effect. Suppose, for example, that a consequentialist donates a wad to charity. Maybe then she feels free to behave worse in other ways than she otherwise would have. Suppose a Kantian remains rigorously honest at some substantial cost to his welfare. Maybe then he feels freer to be a jerk to his students. One depressing thought is that all this cancels out: Our efforts to live by our ethical principles exert sufficient psychic costs that we compensate by acting worse in other ways, only moving around the lump under the rug.

A very different possibility: Maybe those of us attracted to moral theorizing tend to be people with deficient moral emotional reactions, which we compensate for intellectually. Our moral reflection as ethicists does morally improve us, after all, relative to where we would be without that reflection -- but that improvement only brings us up to average.

Still another possibility: Ethicists are especially talented at coming up with superficially appealing rationalizations of immoral behavior, setting them free to engage in immoralities that others would resist. On average, the boost from harmonizing to stricter norms and the loss from toxic rationalization approximately cancel out.

There are other possibilities, too, interesting and empirically risky. We should explore such possibilities! But I don't think that such exploration is what ethicists have in mind when they say their job is only to theorize about morality, not to live it.

Fifth: I acknowledge that there is something a bit unfair, still, about holding ethicists to especially high standards because of their career choice. I don't really want to do that. In fact, I find something admirable in embracing and advocating stringent moral standards, even if one doesn't succeed in living up to those standards. Ultimately, most of the weight in evaluating people's moral character should rest on how they behave, not on how far they fall short of their own standards, which might be self-scathingly high or self-flatteringly low.

My aim is not to scold ethicists for failing to live up to their often high standards but rather to confront the issue of why there seems to be such a tenuous connection between philosophical moral reflection and real-world moral behavior. The dismissive "that's not my job" seems to me to be exactly the wrong spirit to bring to the issue.

On Whether the Rich Are Jerks

A recent article by Paul Piff and collaborators, purporting to show that rich people are jerks (more formally: "higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior"), has been getting attention in the popular media. Numerous people have sent me the article, correctly surmising that I'd be interested given my own research on the moral behavior of (generally high socioeconomic status) ethicists.

The article nicely displays some of the difficulties of researching moral behavior.

First, let me express a thought about the article's reception. If Piff and collaborators had found no differences in behavior, it seems a reasonable conjecture that the article would have received less attention. It might even have been difficult to publish at all. The same might be true even if Piff et al had found significant results but in the opposite direction, that is, if they had found the rich better behaved. Readers' and referees' critical acumen would probably have been activated, much more so than for a sexy result that tickles our fancy. Consider the many filters that a study must pass -- from approval by one's advisor, to design, to data collection, to analysis and write-up, to refereeing, to editorial acceptance, to public dissemination. At each step, the sexy study has an advantage over less-sexy competitors. The cumulative advantage in the marketplace of ideas should make us nervous about forming our opinions based on what we see in the news. (I recognize this applies to my own research on ethics professors too. So far, my most frequently mentioned study on ethicists is the one study that found ethicists behaving worse.)

Now let's consider the methods. The authors report the results of seven different studies.

Two studies examine the rudeness of drivers. Piff et al report that people driving fancy cars are less likely to wait their turn at a four-way stop and less likely to stop for a pedestrian entering a crosswalk. While I like the real-world naturalness of this study ("ecological validity"!), this particular measure seems very likely to be subject to experimenter effects -- that is, distortion in coding and results so as to favor the hypothesis of the experimenter. Experimenter effects can be large even when there is no obvious source of bias (hence medical research typically aims to be "double blind"). In this case the sources of possible coder bias seem obvious and very difficult to control. This is especially true of the crosswalk study. A confederate of the experimenter steps out into the crosswalk, and the experimenter codes both the perceived status of the car and whether it stops. Wisely, the status of the car is coded before the experimenter knows whether it has stopped. But anyone who has been a pedestrian in the San Francisco Bay Area (where the study was conducted) knows that the crosswalk is a place of subtle communication between ped and driver: You take a step out, you catch the driver's eye. How confidently you step, the look on your face, your reaction (or not) to the driver's glance and to the change (or not) of velocity -- all this has a big effect on what happens. The results might as easily reflect the expectations of the experimenter as any real difference in driving patterns. So this is exactly the sort of case in which one would expect large experimenter effects. Since the results have only mid-grade p values (.05 > p > .01), a small experimenter effect could vitiate them entirely.

(Piff et al state that the coders and confederates were "blind to the hypothesis of the study", but it is hard to imagine that the coders don't at least have strong suspicions, given that they are being asked to code the luxuriousness of the vehicles. At the very least, this should make vehicle status very salient to them, amping up any of the coders' prior expectations of a relationship between vehicle status and driving behavior.)

How about the other studies? Studies 3 and 5 asked participants to read scenarios and then describe how ethically or unethically they would act in those scenarios. Piff et al report that participants reporting higher social class also report that they would act less ethically in such scenarios. Would it seem too fussy of me to say that I don't fully trust self-report of moral behavior in hypothetical scenarios? I would like some evidence that this isn't, say, actually a measure of honesty and frankness instead of a measure of differences in how one would really act in such scenarios, with self-reports of less moral behavior revealing more honesty and frankness than do self-reports of moral perfection. That interpretation would completely flip the moral significance of Piff et al's results. Or maybe the measure is really something more like a measure of one's opinion about one's own moral character, which might have a zero correlation with real differences in moral character (as I suggest here)?

In Study 4, after completing filler tasks, participants were offered candy from a jar ostensibly for children in a nearby laboratory. Afterwards, they were asked how many candies they had taken from the jar. Participants who had been primed to think of themselves as relatively low class (by being asked to compare themselves to the rich, the well educated, and the prestigiously employed) reported having taken less candy than participants who had been primed to think of themselves as relatively high class [edited 5/28]. "Wait, what?" I hear you asking. They reported having taken more candy? But did they actually take more candy? If I'm reading the article correctly, the experimenters chose not to measure actual theft, relying on self-report instead, though the subjects' fingers were right there in the jar! Thus, honesty is confounded with immorality, as in Studies 3 and 5. Perhaps I can also mention the weirdness of coming into a psychology lab and then being offered candy ostensibly for children elsewhere. Are participants really buying this cover story? I participated in a few psychology studies as an undergrad, and I suspect I wouldn't have bought it for a minute. Educated undergrads expect to be lied to by psychologists.

Study 6 also has cover story problems (see also my discussion of a similar study by Gino and Ariely). Participants are set in front of a computer ostensibly presenting them with the outcome of random die rolls. Participants are asked to self-report the outcome -- without the experimenter checking -- and they are told they will have a higher chance of winning a prize if they self-report higher results. I ask you to imagine yourself as a participant in this experiment. What do you think is going on? Is there a moral obligation to tell the truth? Or is the whole thing just silly? The experimenters have brought you into this weird situation in which they seem, pretty much explicitly, to be asking you to lie to them. They, of course, are themselves lying to you, as you probably suspect. The connection between behavior in this setting and real-world honesty seems dubious at best.

In Study 7, participants were either asked to list three things about their day or three benefits of greed. They were then asked to self-report whether they would engage in immoral behavior in hypothetical scenarios. Participants who had been asked to list positive features of greed said that they would engage in more immoral behavior in the hypothetical scenarios, and this was especially the case for the lower socioeconomic status participants. Therefore...? In addition to the general types of concerns raised above, I might mention that an experimental context in which a researcher is asking you to list advantages of greed might encourage the respondent to entertain certain hypotheses about the experiment that influence her answers. It might also encourage the respondent to expect a more forgiving moral atmosphere in which self-report of selfish behavior would be viewed less negatively.

Real moral behavior is hard to measure. I appreciate the difficulty of the researchers' task. Three cheers for convergent measures! I think it's cool that this is being done, and I enjoyed reading the article and thinking about the issues. But I hope I will be forgiven for not buying it in this case.

Update, May 28: Readers of the post might also be interested in this critical reaction and response (HT Rolf Degen).