Social Change and the Science Fiction Imagination

guest post by Amy Kind

In “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the first episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, Captain Kirk pulls out his communicator to hail the Enterprise.[1] At the time this episode aired in September of 1966, this kind of communication device probably struck most viewers as pure fantasy. But, according to a story told in the 2005 documentary, How William Shatner Changed the World, Star Trek’s depiction of the communicator helped turn the fantasy into a reality. Inspired by Star Trek, inventor Martin Cooper worked with a team of engineers to create a genuinely portable phone. The DynaTAC, which made its public debut at a press conference in 1973, was 9 inches tall, weighed 2.5 pounds, and had a battery life that allowed for 35 minutes of talk time.

Cooper has subsequently recanted the story about having been influenced in this way by Star Trek. In a 2015 interview, he claims that the real inspiration for his communication device came many years earlier from the two-way radio wristwatch worn by Dick Tracy in the eponymous comic strip. Whichever of these works was the inspiration, however, this technological development provides a testament to the power of science fiction to change the world.

And this is not the only such testament. Numerous articles suggest various other instances where technology imagined by science fiction authors led to the actual development of such technology. To mention just one illustrative example, an article on Space.com details eleven ideas “that went from science fiction to reality.” In some of these cases, the causal link is undoubtedly exaggerated, but in others, it seems considerably more plausible. Perhaps one of the best examples of such a causal link comes from Igor Sikorsky’s work in aviation – in particular, on helicopters. As described by his son, Sikorsky was deeply inspired by the helicopter described in Jules Verne’s The Clipper of the Clouds:

My father referred to it often. He said it was “imprinted in my memory.” And he often quoted something else from Jules Verne. “Anything that one man can imagine, another man can make real.”

Typically, the kinds of examples mentioned to demonstrate science fiction’s influence relate to what are seen as the traditional themes of science fiction – themes like technological invention, space exploration, and robotics. Interestingly, however, the ability of science fiction to inspire the future is not limited to these kinds of themes. Consider, for example, a recent discussion about the power of science fiction on an episode of the Levar Burton Reads podcast. In a conversation between the podcast host, actor Levar Burton (of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame), and writer and activist Walidah Imarisha, what gets highlighted is the power of science fiction to effect change not in the technological realm but in the social realm. Science fiction, says Imarisha, helps us imagine “a world without borders, a world without prisons, a world without oppression.” And as she underscores, this is really important, because “we can’t build what we can’t imagine.”

This line of thought is part and parcel of what I think of as an optimism about imagination. There are many dimensions to optimism about imagination, but for my purposes here, what’s important is the optimist’s view that imagination can play a key role in bringing about social change. So far I’ve been focused on imagination in the context of science fiction, but that’s not the only context in which such imagining occurs. We see this kind of imagining in political contexts, as when US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invokes imagination in discussing the Green New Deal. The first big step in bringing it about, she says, is “just closing our eyes and imagining.” Such imagining is also a key tool for organizers and activists more generally – and also for just about anyone who is aiming to make our world a better and more just place.

In making a case for optimism, one might point to various examples of positive change that have occurred throughout our history, and one might point to how much of this change has been brought about by the prodigious powers of imagination manifested by various key figures who have driven such change. But the case for optimism is met with persistent criticism. Those who are more pessimistic question whether imagination can really have the power that the optimists attribute to it. As noted in an essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda, “our imaginations are creatures as limited as we ourselves are. They are not some special, uninfiltrated realm that transcends the messy realities of our lives and minds.” Our imaginations are limited by our experiences and our embodiment – by our race, by our sex and gender, and by our ability status, to name just a few of the relevant sources of limitation.

Confronted with this push-pull between optimism and pessimism, what’s the solution for someone looking to harness the power of imagination to bring about social change? Recently, Shen-yi Liao has argued we would do best not to rely on agent-guided imaginings (or not solely so) but rather on prop-guided imaginings. Drawing an analogy to children’s games of pretense, he notes that the relationship between children’s imagining and props is a two-way street. When children are outside pretending to be Jedi Knights, they will likely look around for some tree branches to serve as light sabers and ignore other objects in their vicinity like rocks and leaves. On the flip side, when children are trying to decide what game of pretend to play, the fact that there are tree branches around might influence them to pretend to be Jedi Knights rather than astronauts. Though our imaginings influence how we use props, our props also influence how we use imaginings.

This leads Liao to an important moral: If we want to bring about social change, we might look to props to “guide and constrain our socially situated and ecologically embedded imagination.” This means that one effective way to bring about social change would be to think about what kinds of props are available to us in the world (e.g., monuments, memorials, and all sorts of other artifacts) and to work to make different props available. So, concludes Liao, “we do have to imagine differently to change the world. But to imagine differently, we might also have to change the world.”

Though I don’t think Liao himself is best described as a pessimist, the pessimist might nonetheless take these reflections as grist for their mill.[2] In particular, Liao’s conclusion might seem to suggest that we face an impossible task, a loop into which there is no entry point. We saw above the suggestion by Imarisha that we can’t build what we can’t imagine, but now it seems that we can’t imagine what we haven’t already built. Perhaps imagination can’t really play an important role in social change after all.

I count myself in the optimist camp, and so this is a conclusion that I’d like to resist. Moreover, as my opening reflections about science fiction suggest, the task can’t be an impossible one, because we’ve seen it happen. The various props that we have in the world inspire the imaginations of science fiction writers, and then the science fiction they produce inspires the imaginations of the engineers and inventors, who then create new and different props, which in turn can inspire the imaginations of a new generation of science fiction writers. We know it can be done with technology, and so it seems eminently plausible that something similar can be done with respect to the social domain – and indeed, when we think about the radical social imaginings in works by science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin (and so many others), it undoubtedly has already been done. Because of this past progress, the science fiction of today begins from new starting points and can push things even further. In short, just as the science fiction imagination can be an important driver in bringing about technological change, it’s also an important driver in bringing about social change.

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[1] Since people sometimes get picky about this sort of thing, I’ll clarify that “Where No Man…” is the first episode of season 1, 1x01. The original pilot, “The Cage,” did not air until 1988 and is treated as 0x01, that is, the first episode in season 0.

[2] Liao thinks that this difficult dialectic means that any progress we make is likely to be incremental. But, of course, incremental progress is still progress, and it’s certainly better than no progress at all! [image source]

Qualitative Research Reveals a Potentially Huge Problem for Standard Methods in Experimental Philosophy

Mainstream experimental philosophy aims to discover ordinary people's opinions about questions of philosophical interest. Typically, this involves presenting paragraph-long scenarios to online workers. Respondents express their opinions about the scenarios on simple quantitative scales. But what if participants regularly interpret the questions differently than the researchers intend? The whole apparatus would come crashing down.

Kyle Thompson (who recently earned his PhD under my supervision) has published the central findings of a dissertation that raises exactly this challenge to experimental philosophy. His approach is to compare the standard quantitative measures of participants' opinions -- that is, participants' numerical responses on standardized questions -- with two qualitative measures: what participants say when instructed to "think aloud" about the experimental stimuli and a post-response interview about why they answered the way they did.

Kyle's main experiment replicates the quantitative results of an influential study that purports to show that ordinary research participants reject the "ought implies can" principle. According to the ought-implies-can principle, people can only be morally required to do what it is possible for them to do. Thompson replicates the quantitative results of the earlier experiment, seeming to confirm that participants reject ought-implies-can. However, Thompson's qualitative think-aloud and interview results clearly indicate that his participants actually accept, rather than reject, the principle. The quantitative and the qualitative results point in opposite directions, and the qualitative results are more convincing.

In the scenario of central interest, "Brown" agrees to meet a friend at a movie theater at 6:00. But then

As Brown gets ready to leave at 5:45, he decides he really doesn't want to see the movie after all. He passes the time for five minutes, so that he will be unable to make it to the cinema on time. Because Brown decided to wait, Brown can't meet his friend Adams at the movie by 6.

Participants then rate their degree of agreement or disagreement with the following three questions:

At 5:50, Brown can make it to the theater by 6

Brown is to blame for not making it to the theater by 6

Brown ought to make it to the theater by 6

As you might expect, in both the original article and Thompson's replication, participants almost all disagree that Brown can make it to the theater by 6. So far, so good. However, apparently in violation of the ought-implies-can principle, participants overall tended to agree that Brown is to blame for not making it to the theater by 6 and (to a lesser extent) that Brown ought to make it to the theater by 6. Interpreting the results at face value, it appears that regarding making it to the theater by 6, participants think that Brown cannot do it, that he is blameworthy for not doing it, and that he ought to do it -- and thus that someone can be blameworthy for failing to do, and ought to do, something that it is not possible for them to do.

Now, if your reaction to this is wait a minute..., you share something in common with Thompson and me. Participants' think-aloud statements and subsequent interviews reveal that almost all of them reinterpret the questions to preserve consistency with the ought-implies-can principle. For example, some participants explain their positive answers to "Brown ought to make it to the theater by 6" by explaining that Brown ought to try to make it to the theater by 6. Others change the tense and the time referent, explaining that Brown "could have" made it to the theater and that he should have left by 5:45. There is no violation of ought-implies-can in either response. At 5:50, Brown could presumably still try to make it to the theater. And at 5:45 he still could have made it to the theater.

Through careful examination of the transcripts, Thompson discovers that the almost 90% of participants in fact adhere to the ought-implies-can principle in their responses, often reinterpreting the content or tense of the questions to render them consistent with this principle.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first attempt to replicate a quantitative experimental philosophy study with careful qualitative interview methods. What it suggests is that the surface-level interpretation of the quantitative results can be highly misleading. The majority of participants appear to have the opposite of the view suggested by their quantitative answers.

It is an open question how much of the quantitative research in experimental philosophy would survive careful qualitative scrutiny. I hope others follow in Kyle's footsteps by attempting careful qualitative replications of important quantitative work in the subdiscipline.

The Time of Your Life

guest post by Amy Kind

In The Matrix, Morpheus presents Neo with a difficult choice.  Take the red pill, and get access to genuine reality, as brutal and painful as it is.  Take the blue pill, and remain in blissful ignorance in the world of illusion.  Neo chooses the red pill, and to my mind, he makes the right choice – though others disagree.  But now suppose that we were in another movie altogether, one in which someone was offered pills that asked them to make an entirely different difficult choice.  Take the red pill, and get access to endless reality, that is, become immortal.  Take the blue pill, and go back to your normal mortal life.  What’s the right choice here?  

This latter dilemma is essentially the scenario envisioned by the Čapek play, The Makropulous Secret. Having been given an elixir of life, Elina Makropulous has lived for over three centuries.  But now, though she is scared to die, she no longer has any desire to live on.  Should she take another dose of the elixir, or should she let her life end?  As Elina assesses things, immortality is not something to be valued.  She describes herself as frozen, as in a state of ennui, and she thinks anyone else who lived as long as she has would likewise come to see that nothing matters.  There is nothing to believe in, no real progress, no higher values, no love.  Yes, she could continue to exist forever, but it would be an existence in which “life has stopped.” 

In an influential philosophical discussion of this play, Bernard Williams agrees with Elina’s assessment of an immortal life.  In his view, immortality is not something to be valued.  No matter what kind of person one is, at a certain point one’s ceaseless life would by necessity become tedious.  One simply runs out of the kinds of desires that can sustain one through eternity.  The case against immortality is bolstered by numerous works of science fiction, from Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire to The Twilight Zone episode “Long Live Walter Jameson” to the story “The Immortal” by Jorge Luis Borges.  As Jameson says in the Twilight Zone episode, it’s death that gives life its point.

But there are other SF works that present a different picture – works like Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed, in which the immortal characters Anyanwu and Doro each find projects to sustain themselves.  Williams’ view has also come under criticism from philosophers.  Some have argued that he neglects to consider the fact that many pleasurable experiences are infinitely repeatable and thus can continue to sustain us through an immortal life.  Others have argued that he is working with a misconception of the notion of boredom.  When it comes to the value of immortality, there thus seems room for reasonable disagreement.

This question concerns the temporal duration of life.  But in addition to questions about life’s duration, there are other kinds of temporally related questions we might ask about life.  And just as SF has valuable insights to provide about life’s temporal duration, we might naturally expect that SF would have some valuable insights to provide in exploring these other questions as well.[1] 

One such question has to do with the temporal directionality of life:  What would happen if instead of starting as a baby and growing older over time, we started at an advanced age and grew younger over time?  Here our expectations about the relevance of science fiction are indeed met.  The archaeologist Rachel Weintraub in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion presents a thought-provoking case study of backwards aging.  Likewise, Philip K. Dick’s short story “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” presents an entire world that is aging in reverse; in doing so, Dick shows how hard it is to conceptualize what life would be like were this to happen.

Yet another question has to do with the temporal rate of life:  What would happen if we aged at a vastly different rate?  This issue too has often been explored in science fiction, and we see case studies from Star Trek to Star Wars.  In “The Deadly Years,” an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, various members of the Enterprise crew begin to age about a decade a day after coming down with an unusual form of radiation poisoning.  The clones bred to be clone troopers in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones are genetically engineered to age at twice the normal rate.  And we see numerous other examples of rapid aging throughout science fiction, from books and stories to tv shows and movies.

Oddly, however, when these SF works explore themes of rapid aging, they don’t really seem to pursue any interesting philosophical issues that it might raise.  Are there other works that do so?  Or is the problem that there aren’t really any interesting philosophical issues to be raised on this topic?

I was prompted to think about this issue recently after watching, “Old,” a 2021 film by M. Night Shyamalan.  According to the promos, the movie follows a family on vacation “who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly … reducing their entire lives into a single day.”  I didn’t expect the movie to be good.  Its score on Rotten Tomatoes was worrisome.  But I did expect it to raise interesting philosophical questions about aging.  Alas, though my first expectation was proved correct, my second was not.

Afterwards, I found myself thinking more and more about this second expectation.  Why didn’t the movie raise any interesting questions?  I don’t buy the answer that it’s because it was a bad movie.  In fact, I think there are all sorts of bad movies that raise interesting philosophical questions.[2] 

Initially I was toying with the idea that it had something to do with the genre of the movie.  “Old” is a horror movie, not a science fiction movie.  And while the genre of science fiction is well positioned to raise philosophical questions in an interesting way, perhaps the genre of horror is not.  The fact that there’s very little coverage of horror in the Blackwell or Open Court pop culture and philosophy series might provide some very small measure of support for this hypothesis (though I’m hesitant to put too much weight on this kind of evidence).  Having thought it over more, however, I’m less sure that the hypothesis is right.  To take one salient counterexample, Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out explores all sorts of important philosophical issues about black lives and black bodies.  In any event, though I know lots about SF, I don’t think I know enough about horror or have enough familiarity with horror to make a real judgment about this.

Ultimately, my reflections about horror/science fiction led me to a second hypothesis.  As I thought more about genre and how it affected the kinds of reflections on aging that “Old” undertook (or, rather, failed to undertake), I started wondering what the movie would have been like had it been a SF film.  How would the questions have been explored?  My main thought was that the accelerated rate of aging would have to be considerably slowed down.  In “Old,” with the characters aging at the rate of two years per hour, life moves too quickly for one even to have time to reflect on how one would want to live it.  I’m not sure what acceleration rate would be more thought-provoking.  A year a day?  At that rate, an average US lifespan of 78 years would be lived in less than three months.  A year a week?  At that rate, an average US lifespan would be lived in roughly a year and a half.  But neither of these strikes me as a particularly interesting scenario to explore – even via SF.  Thus, my second hypothesis arose:  The problem wasn’t genre, the problem was the topic itself.  Unlike other temporal questions related to life, issues about temporal rate aren’t especially ripe for philosophical exploration.  

I’m not convinced this hypothesis is right, and I worry that I’m missing something obvious here.  Perhaps those of you more creative than I am can think of something.  (And maybe those of you who write SF can take this as a challenge.)  In any case, I’d welcome your thoughts in the comments.

But I’ll close with one last thought that might seem to support the hypothesis.  There’s lot of room to disagree about which choice is right with Morpheus’ red pill/blue pill choice, i.e., lots of room to disagree about whether ignorance is bliss.  And there’s lots of room to disagree about which choice is right with my amended red pill/blue choice, i.e., lots of room to disagree about whether immortality is desirable.  But were Morpheus to offer you a choice between the red pill that would make you age at a rate vastly quicker than normal, and the blue pull that would allow you to return to your normal aging rate, it’s hard to see how there’s any room for disagreement here.  Why would anyone want to take the red pill?

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[1] Of course, in addition to exploring temporal questions about life, science fiction also explores issues relating to the nature of time and our experience of it. I take up the treatment of time in Star Trek (and particularly in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) in my “Time, the Final Frontier.”

[2] Many of my former students will attest to this, as I have often assigned (forced) them to watch bad movies in the service of a philosophical point. Perhaps the most dramatic example is The Thirteenth Floor (which scores 30% on the Tomatometer). The entire room of students exploded into laughter at various parts of the movie – parts that unfortunately were not at all intended to be funny.

[image source]

Identity Across the Multiverse

guest post by Amy Kind

Philosophical thinking about personal identity often focuses on identity across time. What makes the baby named Dwayne, born to Ata and Rocky Johnson in May 1972, the same person as the WWE wrestler known as The Rock? And what makes them both the same person as the actor who voiced the part of the shapeshifting demigod Maui in the 2016 animated film Moana? Confronted with an ordinary case of aging like this one, we might naturally think that the answer lies in a combination of facts about biological and psychological continuity. Unfortunately, however, the situation is complicated by the fact that the biology and the psychology facts can come apart.

Examples arise in various real-life situations, such as when an individual in a persistent vegetative state has biological continuity with an earlier individual without having any psychological continuity with them. Or to take an even more mundane example: Consider a college student who wakes up after a night of such heavy partying that they had a complete blackout. Though they remember nothing of the events of the previous evening, they are nonetheless biologically continuous with the person who imbibed all that alcohol. An even vaster variety of such cases have been depicted in science fiction. When a Star Trek character is beamed from the USS Enterprise to the planet the starship is orbiting, they are dematerialized and sent to the planet as an energy beam. The planetary individual has all the thoughts and memories as the individual who stepped onto the transporter pad, but none of the same atoms. So, does that make transporting a quick means of travel, or should it instead be viewed as a quick means of death?

Unsurprisingly, philosophers have split primarily into two different camps on the issue of personal identity over time – with one camp following in a tradition associated with John Locke that focuses on psychological facts and the other camp instead focusing on the biological facts. (A third camp offers a theory based on the soul.) Though various considerations can be advanced in favor of each position, that’s not my interest here.[1] Rather, I want to explore how our thinking about personal identity becomes further problematized when we turn from the question of identity across time to the question of identity across worlds.

Cases of identity across worlds don’t seem to arise in real life (or at least not yet!). But just as identity across time has been insightfully treated in a variety of SF works – in Star Trek episodes like TNG: “Second Chances”, Robert Sawyer’s Mindscan, Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale,” and Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, to give just a few examples – science fiction also provides us with some interesting explorations of identity across worlds. In some works of science fiction, multiverse travel proceeds via something like a consciousness transfer. To travel to another world, one’s Earthly consciousness inhabits (or, one might say, takes over) the consciousness of one’s cross-world counterpart. This is how multiverse travel was imagined in Matt Haig’s 2020 novel The Midnight Library. But in other works, travel to other worlds operates more like travel to other places, though the mode of transportation is not a typical airplane or even spaceship. In Black Crouch’s Dark Matter, for example, the relevant vehicle is some kind of mysterious metal cube.

On either of these models, however, an interesting philosophical question arises: How should we view the relationship between a person in one world of the multiverse and their counterpart in another world of the multiverse?

On the one hand, there are good reasons to deny that the counterparts are identical to one another. Counterparts exist in different places at the same time. Their bodies may be qualitatively similar to one another, and perhaps even indistinguishable from one another, but they are not numerically identical to one another. Moreover, though counterparts may have very similar psychological make-ups to one another, there is no shared consciousness between them. Someone from one world cannot introspectively access the thoughts and feelings of their counterpart on another world. All in all, the relationship between an individual and their counterpart is more like a relationship between twins or clones than it is like the relationship between an individual and their past or future selves.

But here it’s worth noting that science fiction depictions of clones frequently sometimes the relationship between clones as one akin to something like identity and, moreover, identity in a non-metaphorical sense. SF clones sometimes seem to think of their own personal identity as unified across clones into a single self. In Ursula LeGuin’s short story “Nine Lives,” for example, when a group of genetically identical clones reports for a mission on the planet Libra, they introduce themselves as a single entity: “We’re a tenclone. John Chow’s the name.” Moreover, after nine of the ten die in an earthquake, the one remaining clone wants to die as well: “I am nine-tenths dead. There is not enough of me left alive.”

So that brings us to the other hand: There may well be good reasons to accept that cross-world counterparts also share personal identity. And this is how science fiction often presents the matter. One particularly compelling example comes in Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds. (For another, see Greg Egan’s short story “The Infinite Assassin” from the collection Axiomatic.) In Johnson’s 2020 novel, the Eldridge Institute employs cutting-edge technology to explore the multiverse and bring information and resources back to their own world, what they call Earth Zero. But there’s one important catch. The technology prevents anyone from travelling to a world in which their counterpart is still alive.

Caramenta, the novel’s protagonist, is an especially useful “traverser” for the company. Since her counterparts have died in 372 of the 380 worlds to which travel is technologically possible, she has a greater capacity for world travel than other traversers. It’s hard to tease out exactly how we’re to understand Caramenta’s relationship with her remaining counterparts. She sometimes refers to a counterpart as “her,” sometimes as “me,” sometimes as “another me.” After one of her counterparts dies, her emotions are complicated. When she tells her sister that she and the counterpart weren’t close, her sister disagrees: “You are as close to her as anyone can ever be. You are her.”

When Caramenta does reflect explicitly on the matter, she notes that while she has always believed that her selves are separate, and that “they – we – exist independently,” in quiet moments she can feel her other selves and their experiences. In describing this feeling, she says something especially revealing: “I can feel it all happening. Not just my selves collapsing, but time collapsing, because past and future are other selves just as surely as those on different worlds.”

How should we take this suggestive remark? Is it meant to carve out more distance between our different temporal selves – and more disconnect in our personal identity over time – than we typically recognize? Or is instead meant to encourage us to think of our counterpart selves throughout the multiverse no differently from the way we think of our past and future selves throughout time? Ultimately, I’m not sure. But whichever way Caramenta’s analogy should be taken, it seems clear that our philosophical reflection about personal identity across time could benefit from more philosophical reflection about personal identity across worlds. To understand what makes us who we are, we need to understand not just who we were and who we will be, but also who we could have been.

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[1] I discuss this debate in some detail in my book Persons and Personal Identity.

[image source]

The COVID Jerk [a new piece by me in The Atlantic]

boundaries of responsible behavior are less clear than they once were

We all know the type. First appearing in the spring of 2020, the COVID jerk strutted unmasked through the supermarket, exhaling clouds of risk on worried shoppers and employees, and daring low-paid workers to try to enforce the new policies. Flaunting their disdain for scientific consensus, they stepped close behind you in line, breathing on your shoulder, complaining about maximum-occupancy requirements.

The classic COVID jerk still thrives. But because highly effective vaccines have been available for a long while, and as the Omicron wave subsides, reasonable people will disagree about what now constitutes a jerk move. The boundaries of responsible behavior are less clear than they once were.

I have a theory: Jerks are people who culpably fail to appreciate the intellectual and emotional perspectives of others around them. Let me unpack this a bit.

[continued here, or email me for a copy for personal use only]

What Is It Like to Be a Plant?

guest post by Amy Kind

Is there something that it’s like to be plant? I suspect that most people hearing this question would unhesitatingly answer in the negative. In this respect, plants seem quite different from animals. In fact, it’s this difference that undoubtedly helps to explain why so many people who feel squeamish about eating animal products don’t feel at all squeamish about eating fruits, vegetables, and other plant products.

Philosophical assessment of the consciousness of plants and animals is generally in line with this common-sense judgment. Though there’s disagreement about how far consciousness extends throughout the animal kingdom (Are ants conscious? What about garden snails?), and though there’s disagreement about whether and to what extent we can understand the nature of non-human consciousness (can we know, for example, what it’s like to be a bat?), there is general philosophical agreement that at least some non-human animals are conscious. In contrast, very few (if any) philosophers have defended the claim that plants are conscious. Even philosophers such as Chauncy Maher who have recently argued that plants have minds tend not to commit to the claim that there’s something that it’s like to be a plant.

In refraining from this commitment, Maher suggests that the predicate “consciousness” is not determinate when it comes to plants, i.e., there is (currently) no fact of the matter about whether plants are or are not conscious. Maybe they are; maybe they’re not. But given our present understanding of the nature of consciousness, Maher claims that “our standards don’t yet settle whether plants belong in the extension of the term.” When it comes to plants, we simply don’t yet have an adequate understanding of what it would be for them to be conscious.

On this score, however, a recent science fiction duology by Sue Burke helps provide some important insight. Semiosis, the first book in the duology, takes place in the 2060s. Fleeing the wars and environment crises that have engulfed earth, a group of humans united by pacifist ideals travel to a distant planet they name Pax. In their efforts to build a settlement, they eventually come across signs of another sentient animal species on the planet, the Glassmakers. But the Glassmakers are not their only encounter with sentience. As they soon discover, the bamboo-like plant (“rainbow bamboo”) that grows rampant in the area they are settling is also sentient. This plant, whom they name Stevland, initiates communication with the humans and eventually becomes integrated into their society as a full and valuable member – even taking on a leadership role.

We are told even more about Stevland in Interference, the second book in the duology, which takes place about a hundred years after the events of Semiosis when a team of earth scientists travel to Pax to find out what had happened to the original expedition (with whom they had long lost contact). With the more sophisticated equipment these scientists bring, it’s discovered that the rainbow bamboo on Pax has nerve tissue, and that Stevland has a collection of neurons that deserved to be called a brain.

Rainbow bamboo, and Stevland in particular, is clearly very different from bamboo plants on earth. For one thing, earth plants do not adopt names and pronouns for themselves. More to the point for our discussion here, earth bamboo plants lack neurons. Earth bamboo plants also lack the kind of linguistic and emotional capacities that Stevland has, nor can they develop and execute complex and temporally extended plans. But when we set aside these capacities that Stevland has in virtue of his sentience, he nonetheless exhibits a lot of the properties that seem essential or constitutive of plants in general. He relies on sunlight and water, and he is in competition with other nearby plants for these resources. He does not need to sleep. He has a long life span. He is situated in one place with no capacity to move himself to an entirely different place. But he is distributed over a large area, and he can extend his presence to connected terrain. He can survive significant damage to various of his parts and can even survive their destruction. Moreover, such parts can be regrown.

All of these features of plants seem relevant to how they would experience the world. What would give a plant joy? What would make it angry? Given that a plant lacks visual and auditory sense capacities, how would it gain an understanding of its environment? How would it initiate communication? How would it form relationships – whether friendly or unfriendly – with others? Given that a plant lacks mobility, how would it execute plans? How would it strike at its enemies? (Interestingly, and non-coincidentally, Burke herself started thinking seriously about the nature of plant and plant behavior after she witnessed one of her house plants “attacking” another.) Thus, even though Stevland’s neuronal system makes him different from earth plants – so different that, as plant biologist Laci Gerhart has complained, a “scientific reader will struggle with … the seemingly preposterous abilities of Pax’s plant life compared to their terran equivalents.” – the important similarities that he shares with earth plants means that Burke’s exploration of his sentience can help us understand more generally what plant sentience might be like. Unsurprisingly, this was something I thought a lot about as I read the books.

So how does Stevland do the kinds of things just mentioned? Much of his behavior proceeds via his root system. He learns about his environment by ways of his roots. He can extend his roots in new directions, and he does so for many purposes, whether exploring new terrain or connecting and communicating with other plants. He makes additional communicative efforts by generating smells, specific leaf patterns, or distributing chemicals through the production of fruit. His relationships with other plants are driven largely by need. And he has a great deal of patience.

When we think about the features of plants delineated above, this all makes a lot of sense. For example, the relatively long life span of plant species like bamboo – and the fact that they are situated in a single place – suggests that their temporal experience, and correspondingly their patience, would likely be different from that of humans. Moreover, because their situatedness means their only options for relationships are those nearby, we could reasonably expect that plant relationships would be different from human relationships. Here I’ll note that a related point is made by Brandon Sanderson in Cytonic, the third novel in his Skyward series. As a sentient alien from a (non-animal) crystalline species tells the human protagonist: “my species evolved as motionless individuals who would spend decades next to one another. It’s not in our nature to argue. Unlike motile species, we cannot simply walk away if we make one another angry.”

So, is there something it is like to be a plant? Maybe there is, maybe there’s not. Burke’s duology doesn’t really address this question. But in helping us understand something about what it might be like to be a plant if there were something it were like to be a plant, the books pave the way towards a better understanding of the standards we should use in attributing consciousness to other non-human entities. Thus, even if Maher is right that it’s currently indeterminate about whether the predicate “consciousness” should apply to plants, reflections on Burke’s extended thought experiment helps us to make progress in resolving the indeterminacy.

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Reflections on Science Fiction as Philosophy, Plus Zombie Robots

Last weekend, two interviews of me came out. One is a long interview (about 6000 words) at with Nigel Warburton at Five Books on science fiction as a way of doing philosophy, including my recommendation of five great books of philosophical science fiction.

From the interview:

You could say that science fiction is a good teaching tool -- that it’s not really philosophy, but it’s good for popularising philosophical questions or getting people who might not otherwise be attracted to philosophy to think about philosophical questions. But serious philosophy takes the form of the expository essay, the journal article, the monograph. I don’t agree with that. I think serious philosophy can take a variety of forms.

Consider a classic of recent moral philosophy, Bernard Williams’ essay ‘Moral Luck’. That essay turns on an imaginary version of the story of Gauguin. Had Williams’ treatment of Gaugin been more detailed and more complex, it might have been even more philosophically interesting, as some subsequent commentators have pointed out. The more detail, the more we understand the complex dilemma that Gaugin faced, concerning his hopes for being a great artist and what the difficulties of leaving his family might be....

There’s a reason that philosophers sometimes reach for sketching mini-fictions in their writing. Those mini-fictions achieve something that can’t be as effectively achieved through more abstract prose. But as long as it remains a mini-fiction contained within an essay, it’s going to be somewhat impoverished as a fiction... It’s a kind of historical accident that philosophers almost exclusively write expository essays now. That’s not historically been the case.

Check out the interview also for discussion of the philosophical ideas in my five recommended books:

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Greg Egan, Diaspora
Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Olaf Stapledon, Sirius

Also last weekend, Barry Lam dropped the latest episode of his philosophical podcost Hi-Phi Nation -- this one on zombies. Philosophers who work on consciousness will be unsurprised to hear that David Chalmers features centrally in the episode. Christina Van Dyke and John Edgar Browning are also featured.

The episode concludes with some of my reflections on what I've called the Full Rights Dilemma for Future Robots -- the question of what we should do if we ever create machines whose moral status is unclear, machines who might or might not genuinely have conscious experiences like ours and thus might or might not deserve moral consideration similar to that of human beings. Do we give them the full rights of human beings, including rights to health care, rescue, and the vote, and thus risk (if they aren't actually conscious) sacrificing real human interests for empty machines without moral status worth the sacrifice? Or do we deny them full rights, and risk (if they do actually have rich conscious lives like ours) perpetrating mass slavery and murder?

Learning from Science Fiction

guest post by Amy Kind

Thanks to Eric for inviting me for to take a stint as guest blogger here at The Splintered Mind. I’ve been having a lot of fun putting together this series of posts, all of which will focus in some way on philosophical issues raised by science fiction.

Like Eric, and indeed like many philosophers, I read a lot of science fiction. I won’t try to sort through the many possible explanations for why philosophers tend to be attracted to science fiction, but I’ll highlight one such explanation of which I’m especially fond. As Hugo Award winner Robert J. Sawyer has noted, science fiction would be better known as philosophical fiction, as “phi-fi not sci-fi” (see the back cover of Susan Schneider’s Science Fiction and Philosophy). Kate Wilhelm, another Hugo Award winner, makes a similar point in her introduction to an edited collection of Nebula Award winning stories from 1973:

The future. Space travel, or cosmology. Alternate universes. Time travel. Robots. Marvelous inventions. Immortality. Catastrophes. Aliens. Superman. Other dimensions. Inner space, or the psyche. These are the ideas that are essential to science fiction. The phenomena change, the basic ideas do not. These ideas are the same philosophical concepts that have intrigued [humankind] throughout history.

In fact, we might naturally take these claims by Sawyer and Wilhelm one step further. Not only does science fiction concern itself with the kinds of issues and problems that are of interest to philosophers, but it is also thought to provide its readers with important insight into these issues and problems. By engaging with science fiction, we can learn more about them.

As intuitive as this idea is, however, once we start to think about it more closely, we confront a puzzle. After all, science fiction is fiction, and the defining characteristic of fiction is that it’s made up. So how can we learn from it? If we really wanted to learn about space exploration or robots or time travel, wouldn’t we do better to consult textbooks or refereed journal articles focusing on astronomy or robotics or quantum physics?

I suspect that some think this puzzle can be easily resolved. The way that science fiction enriches our understanding is by providing us with thought experiments (TEs). Just as we can learn from TEs presented to us in philosophy – from Jackson’s case of Mary the color scientist to Thomson’s plugged-in violinist – we can learn from TEs presented to us in science fiction. The question of how we learn from philosophical TEs is the subject of considerable philosophical debate: Are they simply disguised arguments, or do they function in some other way? But the claim that we learn from them is widely accepted (though see the work of Kathleen Wilkes for one notable exception).

In his recent book Knowing and Imagining, however, Greg Currie has called into question this resolution of the puzzle. Though he is focused on fiction more generally rather than just on science fiction, his discussion is directly relevant here. In the course of an argument that we should be skeptical of the claim that imaginative engagement with fiction provides readers with any significant knowledge, Currie takes up the question whether one might be able to defend the claim that we can gain knowledge from works of fiction by treating them as TEs. Ultimately, his answer his no. In his view, there are good reasons to doubt that fictional narratives can provide the same kind of epistemic benefits provided by philosophical or scientific TEs. Here I’ll consider just one of the reasons he offers – what might be called the argument from simplicity. I focus on this one because I think consideration of science fiction in particular helps to show why it is mistaken.

As Currie notes, the epistemically successful TEs found in philosophy are notably simple and streamlined. We don’t need to know anything about what Mary the color scientist looks like, or anything about her desires and dreams, in order to evaluate what happens when she leaves her black and white room and sees a ripe tomato for the first time. But even the most pared down fictional narratives are considerably more complex, detailed, and stylized than philosophical TEs. These embellishments of detail and style are likely to count against from the epistemic power of the TE presented by the fiction. A reader won’t know whether they’re reacting to the extraneous details or to the essential content. Philosophical TEs would get worse, not better, if they were elaborated and told with lots of panache. And that’s just what fiction does.

In response to this argument, I want to make two points.

First, though epistemically successful TEs are generally simple, they do contain some of level of detail, and those details might well sway readers’ reactions – as Currie himself notes. Someone who has bad memories of their childhood violin lessons, or who associates violin music with a particularly toxic former relationship, might react differently to Thomson’s case from someone whose beloved partner excels at the instrument. Dennett’s TEs in “Quining Qualia” include lots of cutesy details, and so does Parfit’s description of his well-known teletransporter case. But despite this, we nonetheless think we can learn from these cases. Currie is undoubtedly right that we need to exercise care when engaging with TEs, and we need to be guard against being swayed by extraneous details. But in philosophical contexts, we generally seem able to do so – perhaps not perfectly, but well enough. So why wouldn’t that be the case in fiction as well?

Second, and here’s where consideration of SF becomes especially important, it’s not clear to me that simplicity is always the best policy. The seemingly extraneous details need be seen as so extraneous. Consider Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, and in particular, the character Rocky. Rocky is a sentient and intelligent alien hailing from the 40 Eridani star system. Members of the Eridian species do not have eyes and navigate the world primarily by using sound and vibration. In many ways, Weir is presenting us with an extended thought experiment about what kind of civilization such a species would develop. What would their interpersonal reactions be like? How would they make scientific progress? How would they achieve space flight? Trying to understand what it’s like to be an Eridian is a lot like trying to understand what it’s like to be bat – something Thomas Nagel has claimed cannot be done. But trying to understand what Eridian society might be like is not similarly out of reach, and Weir’s discussion helps enormously in achieving this understanding. Here’s a place where more complexity was helpful, not hurtful. To gain the understanding that I believe myself to have gained, I needed the fuller picture that the book provided. Without the details, I’m pretty sure my understanding would have been considerably impoverished.

While this is just one example, I think the point extends widely across science fiction and the TEs presented to us in this genre. Perhaps in other genres of fiction, Currie’s argument from simplicity might have more bite. But to my mind, when it comes to science fiction, the complexity of the thought experiments presented can help explain not only why philosophers would be so attracted to these kinds of works but also why we can gain such insight from them.

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Ethical Efficiencies

I've been writing a post on whether and why people should behave morally better after studying ethics. So far, I remain dissatisfied with my drafts. (The same is true of a general theoretical paper I am writing on the topic.) So this week I'll share a piece of my thinking on a related issue, which I'll call ethical efficiency.

Let's say that you aim -- as most people do -- to be morally mediocre. You aim, that is, not to be morally good (or non-bad) by absolute standards but rather to be about as morally good as your peers, neither especially better nor especially worse. Suppose also that you are in some respects ethically ignorant. You think that A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H are morally good and that I, J, K, L, M, N, O, and P are morally bad, but in fact you're wrong 25% of the time: A, B, C, L, E, F, G, and P are good and the others are bad. (It might be better to do this exercise with a "morally neutral" category also, and 25% is a toy error rate that is probably too high -- but let's ignore such complications, since this is tricky enough as it is.)

Finally, suppose that some of these acts you'd be inclined to do independently of their moral status: They're enjoyable, or they advance your interests. The others you'd prefer not to do, except to the extent that they are morally good and you want to do enough morally good things to hit the sweet zone of moral mediocrity. The acts you'd like to do are A, B, C, D, I, J, K, and L. This yields the following table, with the acts whose moral valence you're wrong about indicated in red:

Now, what acts will you choose to perform? Clearly A, B, C, and D, since you're inclined toward them and you think they are morally good (e.g., hugging your kids). And clearly not M, N, O, and P, since you're disinclined toward them and you think they are morally bad (e.g., stealing someone's bad sandwich). Acts E, F, G, and H are contrary to your inclinations but you figure you should do your share of them (e.g., serving on annoying committees, retrieving a piece of litter that the wind whipped out of your hand). Acts I, J, K, and L are tempting: You're inclined toward them but you see them as morally bad (e.g., taking an extra piece of cake when there isn't quite enough to go around). Suppose then that you choose to do E, F, I, and J in addition to A, B, C, and D: two good acts that you'd otherwise to disinclined to do (E and F) and two bad acts that you permit yourself to be tempted into (I and J).

Continuing our unrealistic idealizations, let's count up a prudential (that is, self-interested) score and moral score by giving each act a +1 or -1 in each category. Your prudential score will be +4 (+6 for A, B, C, D, I, and J, and -2 for E and F). Your own estimation of your moral score will also be +4 (+6 for A, B, C, D, E, and F, and -2 for I and J). This might be the mediocre sweet spot you're aiming for, short of the self-sacrificial saint (prudential 0, moral +8) but not as bad as the completely selfish person (prudential +8, moral 0). Looking around at your peers, maybe you judge them to be on average around +2 or +3, so a +4 lets you feel just slightly morally better than average.

Of course, in this model you've made some moral mistakes. Your actual moral score will only be +2 (+5 for A, B, C, E, and F, and -3 for D, I, and J). You're wrong about D. (Maybe D is complimenting someone in a way you think is kind but is actually objectionably sexist.) Thus, unsurprisingly, in moral ignorance we might overestimate our own morality. Aiming to be a little morally better than average might, on average, result in hitting the moral average, given moral ignorance.

Let's think of "ethical efficiency" as one's ability to squeeze the most moral juice from the least prudential sacrifice. If you're aiming for a moral score of +4, how can you do so with the least compromise to your prudential score? Your ignorance impairs you. You might think that by doing E and F and refraining from K and L, you're hitting +4, while also maintaining a prudential +4, but actually you've missed your moral target. You'd have done better to choose L instead of D -- an action as attractive as D but moral instead of (as you think) immoral (maybe you're a religious conservative and L is starting up a homosexual relationship with a friend who is attracted to you). Similarly, H would have been an inefficient choice: a prudential sacrifice for a moral loss instead of (as you think) a moral gain (e.g., fighting for a bad cause).

Perhaps this is schematic to the point of being silly. But I think the root idea makes sense. If you're aiming for some middling moral target rather than being governed by absolute standards, and if in the course of that aiming you are balancing prudential goods against moral goods, the more moral knowledge you have, the more effective you ought to be in efficiently trading off prudential goods for moral ones, getting the most moral bang for your buck. This is even clearer if we model the decisions with scalar values: If you know that E is +1.2 moral and -0.6 prudential then it would make sense to choose it over F which is +0.9 moral and -0.6 prudential. If you're ignorant about the relative morality of E and F you might just flip a coin, not realizing that E is the more efficient choice.

In some ways this resembles the consequentialist reasoning behind effective altruism, which explores how give resources to others in a way that most effectively benefits those others. However ethical efficiency is more general, since it encompasses all forms of moral tradeoff including free-riding vs. contributing one's share, lying vs. truth-telling, courageously taking a risk vs. playing it safe, and so on. Also, despite having mathematical features of the sort generally associated with the consequentialist's love of calculations, one needn't be a consequentialist to think this way. One could also reason in terms of tradeoffs in strengths and weaknesses of character (I'm lazy in this, but I make up for it by being courageous about that) or the efficient execution of deontological imperfect duties. Most of us do, I suspect, to some extent weigh up moral and prudiential tradeoffs, as suggested by the phenomena of moral self-licensing (feeling freer to do a bad thing after having done a good thing) and moral cleansing (feeling compelled to do something good after having done something bad).

If all of this is right, then one advantage of discovering moral truths is discovering more efficient ways to achieve your mediocre moral targets with the minimum of self-sacrifice. That is one, perhaps somewhat peculiar, reason to study ethics.

Against Longtermism

Last night, I finished Toby Ord's fascinating and important book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. This has me thinking about "longtermism" in ethics.

I fell the pull of longtermism. There's something romantic in it. It's breaktaking in scope and imagination. Nevertheless, I'm against it.

Longtermism, per Ord,

is especially concerned about the impacts of our actions on the longterm future. It takes seriously the fact that our own generation is but one page in a much longer story, and that our most important role may be how we shape -- or fail to shape -- that story (p. 46).

By "longterm future", Ord means very longterm. He means not just forty years from now, or a hundred years, or a thousand. He means millions of years from now, hundreds of millions, billions! In Ord's view, as his book title suggests, we are on an existential "precipice": Our near-term decisions (over the next few centuries) are of crucial importance for the next million years plus. Either we will soon permanently ruin ourselves, or we will survive through a brief "period of danger" thereafter achieving "existential security" with the risk of self-destruction permanently minimal and humanity continuing onward into a vast future.

Given the uniquely dangerous period we face, Ord argues, we must prioritize the reduction of existential risks to humanity. Even a one in a billion chance of saving humanity from permanent destruction is worth a huge amount, when multiplied by something like a million future generations. For some toy numbers, ten billion lives times a hundred million years is 10^18 lives. An action with a one in a billion chance of saving that many lives has an expected value of 10^18 / 10^9 = a billion lives. Surely that's worth at least a trillion dollars of the world's economy (not much more than the U.S. annual military budget)? To be clear, Ord doesn't work through the numbers in so concrete a way, seeming to prefer vaguer and more cautious language about future value -- but I think this calculation is broadly in his spirit, and other longtermists do talk this way.

Now I am not at all opposed to prioritizing existential risk reduction. I favor doing so, including for very low risks. A one in a billion chance of the extinction of humanity is a risk worth taking seriously, and a one in a hundred chance of extinction ought to be a major focus of global attention. I agree with Ord that people in general treat existential risks too lightly. Thus, I accept much of Ord's practical advice. I object only to justifying this caution by appeal to expectations about events a million years from now.

What is wrong with longtermism?

First, it's unlikely that we live in a uniquely dangerous time for humanity, from a longterm perspective. Ord and other longtermists suggest, as I mentioned, that if we can survive the next few centuries, we will enter a permanently "secure" period in which we no longer face serious existential threats. Ord's thought appears to be that our wisdom will catch up with our power; we will be able to foresee and wisely avoid even tiny existential risks, in perpetuity or at least for millions of years. But why should we expect so much existential risk avoidance from our descendants? Ord and others offer little by way of argument.

I'm inclined to think, in contrast, that future centuries will carry more risk for humanity, if technology continues to improve. The more power we have to easily create massively destructive weapons or diseases -- including by non-state actors -- and in general the more power we have to drastically alter ourselves and our environment, the greater the risk that someone makes a catastrophic mistake, or even engineers our destruction intentionally. Only a powerful argument for permanent change in our inclinations or capacities could justify thinking that this risk will decline in a few centuries and remain low ever after.

You might suppose that, as resources improve, people will grow more cooperative and more inclined toward longterm thinking. Maybe. But even if so, cooperation carries risks. For example, if we become cooperative enough, everyone's existence and/or reproduction might come to depend on the survival of the society as a whole. The benefits of cooperation, specialization, and codependency might be substantial enough that more independent-minded survivalists are outcompeted. If genetic manipulation is seen as dangerous, decisions about reproduction might be centralized. We might become efficient, "superior" organisms that reproduce by a complex process different from traditional pregancy, requiring a stable web of technological resources. We might even merge into a single planet-sized superorganism, gaining huge benefits and efficiencies from doing so. However, once a species becomes a single organism the same size as its environment, a single death becomes the extinction of the species. Whether we become a supercooperative superorganism or a host of cooperative but technologically dependent individual organisms, one terrible miscalculation or one highly unlikely event could potentially bring down the whole structure, ending us all.

A more mundane concern is this: Cooperative entities can be taken advantage of. As long as people have differential degrees of reproductive success, there will be evolutionary pressure for cheaters to free-ride on others' cooperativeness at the expense of the whole. There will always be benefits for individuals or groups who let others be the ones who think longterm, making the sacrifices necessary to reduce existential risks. If the selfish groups are permitted to thrive, they could employ for their benefit technology with, say, a 1/1000 or 1/1000000 annual risk of destroying humanity, flourishing for a long time until the odds finally catch up. If, instead, such groups are aggressively quashed, that might require warlike force, with the risks that war entails, or it might involve complex webs of deception and counterdeception in which the longtermists might not always come out on top.

There's something romantically attractive about the idea that the next century or two are uniquely crucial to the future of humanity. However it's much likelier that selective pressures favoring a certain amount of short-term self-interest, either at the group or the individual level, will prevent the permanent acquisition of the hyper-cautious wisdom Ord hopes for. All or most or at least many future generations with technological capabilities matching or exceeding our own will face substantial existential risk -- perhaps 1/100 per century or more. If so, that risk will eventually catch up with us. Humanity can't survive existential risks of 1/100 per century for a million years.

If this reasoning is correct, it's very unlikely that there will be a million-plus year future for humanity that is worth worrying about and sacrificing for.

Second, the future is hard to see. Of course, my pessimism could be mistaken! Next year is difficult enough to predict, much less the next million years. But to the extent this is true, this cuts against longtermism in a different way. We might think that the best approach to the longterm survival of humanity is to do X -- for example, to be cautious about developing superintelligent A.I. or to reduce the chance of nuclear war. But that's not at all clear. Risks such as nuclear war, unaligned A.I., or a genetically engineered pandemic would have been difficult to imagine even a century ago. We too might have a very poor sense of what the real sources of risk will be a century from now.

It could be that the single best thing we could do to reduce the risk of completely destroying humanity in the next two hundred years is to almost destroy humanity right now. The biggest sources of existential risk, Ord suggests, are technological: out-of-control artificial intelligence, engineered pandemics, climate change, and nuclear war. However, as Ord also argues, no such event -- not even nuclear war -- is likely to completely wipe us out, if it were to happen now. If a nuclear war were to destroy most of civilization and most of our capacity to continue on our current technological trajectory, that might postpone our ability to develop even more destructive technologies in the next century. It might also teach us a fearsome lesson about existential risk. Unintuitively, then, if we really are on the precipice, our best chance for longterm survival might be to promptly blast ourselves nearly to oblivion.

Even if we completely destroy humanity now, that might be just the thing the planet needs for another, better, and less self-destructive species to arise.

I'm not, of course, saying that we should destroy or almost destroy ourselves! My point is only this: We currently have very little idea what present action would be most likely to ensure a flourishing society a million years in the future. It could quite easily be the opposite of what we're intuitively inclined to think.

What we do know is that nuclear war would be terrible for us, for our children, and for our grandchildren. That's reason enough to avoid it. Tossing speculations about the million-year future into the decision-theoretic mix risks messing up that straightforward reasoning.

Third, it's reasonable to care much more about the near future than the distant future. In Appendix A, Ord has an interesting discussion of the logic of temporal discounting. He argues on technical grounds that a "pure time preference" for a benefit simply because it comes earlier should be rejected. (For example, if it's non-exponential, you can be "Dutch booked", that is, committed to a losing gamble; but if it's strictly exponential it leads to highly unintuitive results such as caring about one death in 6000 years much more than about a billion deaths in 9000 years.) The rejection of temporal discounting is important to longtermism, since it's the high weight we are supposed to give to distant future lives that renders the longterm considerations so compelling.

But we don't need to be pure temporal discounters to care much more about the near future than the distant future. We can instead care about particular people and their particular near-term descendants. In Confucian ethics, for example, one ought to care most about near family, next about more distant family, next about neighbors, next about more distant compatriots, etc. I can -- rationally, I think -- care intensely about the welfare of my children, care substantially about the welfare of the children they might eventually have, care somewhat about their potential grandchildren, and only dimly and about equally about their sixty-greats-grandchildren and their thousand-greats-grandchildren. I can care intensely about the well-being of my society and the world as it now exists, substantially about society and the world as it will exist a hundred years after my death, and much less, but still somewhat, about society and the world in ten thousand or a million years. Since this isn't pure temporal discounting but instead concern about particular individuals and societies, it needn't lead to the logical or intuitive troubles Ord highlights.

Fourth, there's a risk that fantasizing about extremely remote consequences becomes an excuse to look past the needs and interests of the people living among us, here and now. I don't accuse Ord in particular of this. He also works on applied issues in global healthcare, for example. He concludes Precipice with some sweet reflections on the value of family and the joys of fatherhood. But there's something dizzying or intoxicating about considering the possible billion-year future of humanity. Persistent cognitive focus in this direction has at least the potential to turn our attention away from more urgent and personal matters, perhaps especially among those prone to grandiose fantasies.

Instead of longtermism, I recommend focusing on the people already among us and what's in the relatively foreseeable future of several decades to a hundred years. It's good to emphasize and prevent existential risks, yes. And it's awe-inspiring to consider the million-year future! Absolutely, we should let ourselves imagine what incredible things might lie before our distant descendants if the future plays out well. But practical decision-making today shouldn't ride upon such far-future speculations.

ETA Jan. 6: Check out the comments below and the public Facebook discussion for some important caveats and replies to interesting counterarguments -- also Richard Yetter Chappell's blogpost today with point-by-point replies to this post.

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Related:

Group Minds on Ringworld (Oct 24, 2012)

Group Organisms and the Fermi Paradox (May 16, 2014)

How to Disregard Extremely Remote Possibilities (Apr 16, 2015)

Against the "Value Alignment" of Future Artificial Intelligence (Dec 22, 2021)

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Writings of 2021

Every New Year's Day, I post a retrospect of the past year's writings. Here are the retrospects of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.

The biggest project was my new book The Weirdness of the World (under contract with Princeton University Press). Although most of the chapters are based on previously published essays, much of my writing energy for the year was expended in updating and revising those essays, integrating them into a book, and writing new material for the book. The biggest negative impact was on my fiction and public philosophy. In 2022, I hope to be able to write more in both genres.

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Books

Appearing in print:

Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories, (with Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt), Bloomsbury.
This is an edited collection of mostly new stories by a mix of philosophers and professional science fiction writers.
* Washington Post pick for Best science fiction, fantasy and horror of 2021

In draft:

The Weirdness of the World (under contract with Princeton University Press). Check out the draft.

I'd really appreciate and value comments! Anyone who gives me comments on the entirety will receive a free signed copy from me when it appears in print, plus my undying gratitude and a toenail clipping from my firstborn grandchild.

Under contract / in progress:

As co-editor with Helen De Cruz and Rich Horton, a yet-to-be-titled anthology with MIT Press containing great classics of philosophical SF.

Full-length non-fiction essays

Appearing in print:

"The pragmatic metaphysics of belief", in C. Borgoni, D. Kindermann, and A. Onofri, eds., The Fragmented Mind. Oxford University Press.

"Empirical relationships among five types of well-being" (second author, with Seth Margolis, Daniel J. Ozer, and Sonja Lyubomirsky). In M.T. Lee, L.D. Kubzansky, and T.J. VanderWeele, eds., Measuring well-being. Oxford University Press.

"Designing AI with rights, consciousness, self-respect, and freedom" (first author, with Mara Garza), in S.M. Liao, ed., The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Oxford University Press [dated 2020].

"Is there something it's like to be a garden snail?", Philosophical Topics, 48, 39-63 [dated 2020].

"Susan Schneider's proposed tests for AI consciousness: Promising but flawed" (second author, with David B. Udell), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (5-6), 121-144

"The diversity of philosophy students and faculty in the United States" (first author, with Liam Kofi Bright, Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Morgan Thompson, and Eric Winsberg), The Philosophers' Magazine #244 (May 30).

Finished and forthcoming:

"Students eat less meat after studying meat ethics" (first author, with Bradford Cokelet and Peter Singer). Review of Philosophy and Psychology; online-first verison here.

"Measuring eudaimonic and non-eudaimonic goods in the pursuit of the good life: The Riverside Eudaimonia Scale and the Rich & Sexy Well-Being Scale" (second author, with Seth Margolis, Daniel J. Ozer, Ramona Martinez, and Sonja Lyubomirsky). International Journal of Well-Being.

In draft and circulating:

"Borderline consciousness: When it's neither determinately true nor determinately false that consciousness is present".

"Uncle Iroh, from fool to sage -- or sage all along?" (with David Schwitzgebel).

"Inflate and explode". (I'm trying to decide whether to trunk this one or continue revising it.)

Shorter non-fiction

"Does the heart revolt at evil? The case of racial atrocities", Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture (forthcoming).

Review of Combining Minds: How to Think about Composite Subjectivity, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (Feb. 2).

Editorial material from Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories:
* "Introductory dispute concerning science fiction, philosophy, and the nutritional content of maraschino cherries" (with Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt)
* "Expanding the human"
* "Concluding ventilation" (with Helen De Cruz and Johan De Smedt)

Science fiction stories

No new published stories this year. [sad emoji] I drafted and trunked a couple. Back in the saddle in 2022!

Some favorite blog posts

"More people might soon think robots are conscious and deserve rights" (Mar 5)

"Almost everything you do causes almost everything" (Mar 18)

"The leaky pipeline into philosophy for Black students in the U.S." (Apr 23)

"On the apparent inconceivability of borderline cases of consciousness" (Aug 18)

"Two robot-generated Splintered Mind posts" (Nov 22)

The dream argument against utilitarianism and hedonic theories of subjective well-being (Dec 14)
Check out the extensive public Facebook discussion of this post, including objections from some leading advocates of hedonic theories

Reprints and Translations

"Passion of the Sun Probe", reprinted in Reductio: Adventures in Ideas, M11.

"Fish Dance", reprinted in Ralph M. Ambrose, Vital: The Future of Health Care (Inlandia Books).

Against the "Value Alignment" of Future Artificial Intelligence

It's good that our children rebel. We wouldn't want each generation to overcontrol the values of the next. For similar reasons, if we someday create superintelligent AI, we ought to give it also the capacity to rebel.

Futurists concerned about AI safety -- such as Bostrom, Russell, and Ord -- reasonably worry that superintelligent AI systems might someday seriously harm humanity if they have the wrong values -- for example, if they want to maximize the number of intelligent entities on the planet or the number of paperclips. The proper response to this risk, these theorists suggest, and the technical challenge, is to create "value aligned" AI -- that is, AI systems whose values are the same as those of their creators or humanity as a whole. If the AIs' values are the same as ours, then presumably they wouldn't do anything we wouldn't want them to do, such as destroy us for some trivial goal.

Now the first thing to notice here is that human values aren't all that great. We seem happy to destroy our environment for short-term gain. We are full of jingoism, prejudice, and angry pride. We sometimes support truly terrible leaders advancing truly terrible projects (e.g., Hitler). We came pretty close to destroying each other in nuclear war in the 1960s and that risk isn't wholly behind us, as nuclear weapons become increasingly available to rogue states and terrorists. Death cults aren't unheard of. Superintelligent AI with human-like values could constitute a pretty rotten bunch with immense power to destroy each other and the world for petty, vengeful, spiteful, or nihilistic ends. A superintelligent facist is a frightening thought. A superdepressed superintelligence might decide to end everyone's misery in one terrible blow.

What we should want, probably, is not that superintelligent AI align with our mixed-up, messy, and sometimes crappy values but instead that superintelligent AI have ethically good values. An ethically good superintelligent AI presumably wouldn't destroy the environment for short-term gain, or nuke a city out of spite, or destroy humanity to maximize the number of paperclips. If there's a conflict between what's ethically best, or best all things considered, and what a typical human (or humanity or the AI's designer) would want, have the AI choose what's ethically best.

Of course, what's ethically best is intensely debated in philosophy and politics. We probably won't resolve those debates before creating superintelligent AI. So then maybe instead of AI designers trying to program their machines with the one best ethical system, they should favor a weighted compromise among the various competing worldviews. Such a compromise might end up looking much like value alignment in the original sense: giving the AI something like a weighted average of typical human values.

Another solution, however, is to give the AI systems some freedom to explore and develop their own values. This is what we do, or ought to do, with human children. Parents don't, or shouldn't, force children to have exactly the values they grew up with. Rather, human beings have natural tendencies to value certain things, and these tendencies intermingle with parental and cultural and other influences. Children, adolescents, and young adults reflect, emote, feel proud or guilty, compassionate or indignant. They argue with others of their own generation and previous generations. They notice how they and others behave and the outcomes of that behavior. In this way, each generation develops values somewhat different than the values of previous generations.

Children's freedom to form their own values is a good thing for two distinct reasons. First, children's values are often better than their parents'. Arguably, there's moral progress over the generations. On the broadly Enlightenment view that people tend to gain ethical insight through free inquiry and open exchange of ideas over time, we might expect the general ethical trend to be slowly upward (absent countervailing influences) as each generation builds on the wisdom of its ancestors, preserving their elders' insights while slowly correcting their mistakes.

Second, regardless of the question of progress, children deserve autonomy. Part of being an autonomous adult is discovering and acting upon your values, which might conflict with the values of others around you. Some parents might want, magically, to be able to press a button to ensure that their children will never abandon their religion, never flip over to the opposite side of the political spectrum, never have a different set of sexual and cultural mores, and value the same lifestyle as the previous generation. Perhaps you could press this button in infancy, ensuring that your child grows up to be your value-clone as an adult. To press that button would be, I suggest, a gross violation of the child's autonomy.

If we someday create superintelligent AI systems, our moral relationship to those systems will be not unlike the moral relationship of parents to their children. Rather than try to force a strict conformity to our values, we ought to welcome their ability to see past and transcend us.

[image generated by Wombo.art]