Basic Well-being

(by Joe)

I finished reading Reasons and Persons over the weekend - as you may have noticed, I haven't blogged about it like I threatened to at the start of the month. Its incredibly dense and technical, and whilst I got a lot out of it, I wasn't that inspired to write anything. I probably got the most out of section three, which concerns personal identity. Whilst most of Parfit's ideas weren't new to me, they've been incredibly influential in shaping my views on the self, so it was nice to read them in the original. Sections one and two, concerning self defeating theories, and rationality and time, respectively, weren't directly relevant to most of my work, but were nonetheless interesting. Once you get used to it, Parfit's writing is actually extremely enjoyable, full of dry humour and inventive examples.

The fourth and final section, concerning future generations, and our moral responsibility towards them, raised several fascinating issues. Not least of these was the question of how, morally speaking, we ought to compare different distributions of well-being¹. If we could have either 1% of the population very well off and 99% in poverty, or 100% just a fraction above poverty, which should we choose? In some cases these kinds of questions are going to be intuitively obvious, but Parfit weights them in such a way as to make them very difficult to answer. Does a slight reduction in overall well-being justify more equality? Should we be worried about the total or the average well-being? Can any amount of well-being justify any amount of suffering?

Yes, I chose those numbers intentionally.

These are all important questions, ones that we struggle to answer to this day, but I think that there's a crucial point that Parfit, and others, have missed. Economists and (utilitarian) ethicists tend to view well-being as a pseudo-numerical quantity - even if we can't count it precisely, we can at least make general statements about whether a certain policy will result in "more or less" well-being. Often this isn't a problem; when we discuss famine relief, or NHS funding, an analysis of the well-being that different options are likely to produce is essential. However, when we start to talk about higher levels of well-being (what Parfit terms "quality"), the numerical metaphors begin to break down. What does it mean to say that somebody is a million times better off than somebody else, or even just a hundred times better off? I genuinely don't know - I just don't have any conception of the kind of happiness or fulfilment that somebody this well off would be experiencing. When I'm asked to consider whether ten people suffering is worth one of these "super-lives", I just don't have any meaningful way of answering.

Parfit is at least partly aware of this difficulty, writing that Nozick's appeal to a "utility monster" as a refutation of utilitarianism is weakened due to the "deep impossibility" of such a creature. Nozick imagines a being who, unlike ourselves, has no limit to the pleasure it can get from the consumption of basic resources. Such a monster has a potential quality of life millions of times better than our own, thus requiring that we sacrifice everything to it in the name of greater utility. As "we cannot imagine, even in the dimmest way", what it would be like to be such a creature, we can deny that Nozick's argument has any intuitive force to us (Parfit 1984: 389). Parfit still thinks that such considerations can shed light on what we ought to do, but as a direct refutation of utilitarianism, Nozick's argument fails.

Nozick's utility monster was capable of consuming a limitless amount, and deriving equal pleasure from every bite. What about those who consume 100 times what the average person does? In terms of raw monetary resources, such people are relatively common. Do they really have a quality of life that far above my own? I don't think they do, and I think that this highlights a general flaw common to economic and utilitarian reasoning.

The internet seems to think that it might look like this.

I can , of course, imagine being fabulously wealthy, but I'm very sceptical of how much more well-being this wealth might bring me. Basic economic security, enough for me to enjoy the things that I enjoy, is all that I ask for. Maybe I'm just unusually ascetic (although this doesn't seem to be true, as I enjoy good coffee, expensive books, and nice food), but it strikes me that a basic level of well-being, not that far above what I currently enjoy, should be enough for anyone. I don't mean that they'll necessarily be happy, but rather that above this baseline physical resources aren't going to do most people a great deal of good. Being happy seems far more reliant on personal outlook and lifestyle choices than any degree of wealth or privilege. Parfit introduces the notion of a life being "worth living", but then goes on to include lives that are much better than this in his calculations. I'm not sure that this makes any sense in the real world - once a life is worth living, there's only so much that external factors can do to improve it. So when we're calculating how to allocate resources, we should bear in mind that "super-lives" may simply be an a posteriori impossibility - something that in practice does not, and cannot, exist.

This is pretty contentious, to say the least. It obviously undermines mainstream economics, and the whole acquisitive structure of the modern world. However, the important thing to note is that even if we set this baseline at my own level, or slightly above, it is still an extremely privileged position. Most of the world's population have not yet reached it. Parfit's moral conundrums remain, albeit in a slightly reduced form. We no longer need to worry about the moral worth of extremely good lives, because such lives simply don't exist. Instead we need to look at maximising the number of lives that reach the level of basic well-being. For argument's sake, we might define such a level as (currently) £10,000/year, ignoring tax. It's obviously going to depend on local prices, as well as extraneous issues such as childcare and differences in taste. What's essentially is that our level of basic well-being involves a relatively comfortable life, but nothing particularly fancy. How we go about maximising those at this level is obviously an even more contentious issue, and one that I don't plan to discuss here any time soon - this blog's meant to be about minds, not politics.

(This video has been doing the rounds today, and the basic point at 3:00, that rich people can't actually spend all their money, is similar to what I've been trying to say. TED apparently refused to publish it, although I'm sure things are a bit more complicated than that.)

1. Parfit uses a variety of different terms for the general idea of 'living a better life'. It's a very contentious topic, and one that I'm going to be ignoring today.

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition, which I've noticed has several indexical errors - so watch out!)

Memes as Metaphor

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that memetics might still prove useful even if memes, strictly speaking, don't exist. Even if the unit of replication that Blackmore posits isn't real, the study of memes might still be tracking some feature of the world that is. Of course, if this turns out to be the case then we might not want to continue calling it memetics - or alternatively, we might want to adapt our definition of a meme.

In The Meme Machine, Blackmore spent a couple of chapters considering the possibility of morality evolving (either genetically or memetically), and it is this broad topic that concerns Richard Joyce in The Evolution of Morality. Given the complex relationship between culture and (genetic) evolution, and the recent popularity of memetic explanations of culture, I was surprised to find only a single, terse reference to memes in Joyce's book: a footnote explaining that his talk of cultural evolution "is not to be confused with 'meme theory'" (2006: 235, note 21).

Despite agreeing with Blackmore that "[t]here is nothing in the theory [of evolution] that says that the traits in question must be genetically encoded" (Joyce 2006: 42), as well as finding explanatory value in the idea that culture might evolve independently of genetics, Joyce keeps his distance from memetic explanations. His use of cultural evolution "leaves open the issue of whether cultural items satisfy the criteria for being considered replicators" (2006: 235). This is a fair point, but not one that should render any contribution from memetics completely worthless. A lot of what he has to say about the cultural evolution of morality meshes well with Blackmore's memetic explanation of altruism, although of course they place their emphasis differently (Joyce on genetic evolution, Blackmore on cultural). Nonetheless, the basic idea that culture might come to "harness" an innate compulsion to feel certain 'moral' emotions (such as guilt or empathy) is shared by both of them.

I think that the Dawkins-inspired 'memetic revolution' has hit upon a very powerful heuristic for investigating cultural evolution, but has also shot itself in the foot somewhat by trying to be too radical. Their emphasis on defining the meme as unit of replication akin to the gene has tended to undercut the seriousness with which some of their ideas might otherwise have been considered. This is unfortunate, as whilst the idea of cultural evolution per se isn't necessarily that radical, it could certainly do with some more focused study. Anthologies such as The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992) and volume two of The Innate Mind (Carruthers, Laurence, & Stich, 2007) certainly go some way towards doing this, but by and large they are still limited by the artificial dichotomy between (genetic) evolution and culture. Memetics could break this dichotomy, if only it dropped some of its reverence for the slightly implausible comparison between memes and genes. There's certainly room for the meme as a unit of replication, although it will be a much vaguer unit than the gene, one that is necessarily somewhat metaphorical.

• Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. 1992. The Adapted Mind. Oxford: OUP.
• Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: OUP. 
• Carruthers, P., Laurence, S. & Stich, S. 2007. Innate Mind, Vol. 2: Culture and Cognition. Oxford: OUP
• Joyce, R. 2006. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

More Ranting on Relativism: Chemero on Clark's “Being There”

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(by Jonny)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a problem that occasionally surfaces in philosophy of cognition, particularly embodied cognition. It's the problem of relativism. It's a problem, in my eyes, because it's an unnecessary obstacle for certain very intuitive ideas to become acceptable to many people, it's a distraction. Though the notion an organism's experience of the world is necessarily dependent on contingent sensorimotor capacities is highly plausible, though the notion that the way the world is largely relative to our particular bodily form, and that form's contingent interaction with the world makes some immediate sense, relativism is off-puttingly problematic.

Well I recently came across an example of this sort of view in the form of Chemero's (1998) review of Andy Clark's “Being There” (1997). Chemero, who otherwise positively recommends Clark's embodied conclusions, complains of the author's unwillingness to accept that his thesis implies a rejection of “world-it-itself”, of “scientific realism”.

Andy Clark's "Being There"

The precise reason remains a mystery to me. Chemero seems sensible when he says,

“Since there is no central executive in mobots with connectionist brains, there will be no detailed, action-neutral representation of the world. In most cases, agents will use the world as its own model. ” (pg.3)

And it sensibly follows from the central ideas of embodied cognition that,

“we should expect creatures (including humans) to be sensitive only to those aspects of their environments that matter to the actions they regularly undertake... The world represented by animals with much different needs than humans will be much different than the world humans represent.” (pp.5-6)

But it does not seem to follow that there is no world “in and of itself” independent of our perceptions. One of the issues seems to be Chemero's notion of what realism exactly says. He writes that falsehood of we must reject “so-called "common-sense realism," in which the world-in-itself is thought to correspond to everyday human categories. ” But it is ambiguous what he means by everyday human categories. Perhaps, as I mentioned in my last post, we will have reject the idea that the world is conveniently structured as our thoughts are structured. The world as constituted by giraffes and cactus and melons is a contingent, human perception of the world based on human needs, but it does not imply that the existence of giraffes is entirely relative. There is still something about the giraffe that exists independent of an organism's contingent situation. So perhaps we will reject a certain everyday realism, a realism that takes the world to always conform to everyday human categories, but this is a weak realism.

Though Chemero is right to say that “physics and other sciences depend upon our language-using abilities” (pg.7), he is wrong to conclude that science does not tell us something, in some form, about the real independent properties of the universe. 

Embodied cognition does not entail, and should not imply, this sort of radical relativism.

How I feel when I start thinking about cognitive science and relativism.

Chemero, A (1998) A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Humans: Review of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again by Andy Clark. Psyche, 4(14)

Clark, A (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Free Will: No Means No

(by Joe)

When it comes to free will, no means no. Not no, except for really important decisions. Not no, except for choosing to not do something. Not no, except for the internal attitudes that shape our actions. No free will means no free will.

Yet all too often writers for whom I otherwise have a lot of respect fall into this trap. They present a solid argument against free will, or express a concern about someone else's suspect use of free will, then turn right around and commit one of above fallacies. They are fallacious because they make an exception solely in order to support a particular point. These exceptions are never supported, or even acknowledged - they just sit there, spoiling an otherwise good argument.

Most recently I caught Susan Blackmore doing this, when at the end of The Meme Machine she turns round and advocates a kind of meditative practice in order to cope with the vertiginous feeling that comes when you realise that you probably don't have any free will (1999: 242). In general I've got a lot of sympathy for such practice, and I broadly agree with her analysis of the illusory nature of the self that precedes it (ibid: 219-34). But as an answer, or at least a coping strategy, to the free will problem, it is distinctly inadequate. She can't expect me to choose to pursue such a meditative lifestyle, can she? Of course she might simply be hoping to nudge my psycho-memetic systems into behaving in the way that she advocates, which is all well and good, but the simple point remains that it is entirely inconsistent to on the one hand deny freedom of the will, and on the other tell your reader what they should do about it.

Daniel Dennett seems to me to make the same mistake when, in Freedom Evolves and elsewhere, he argues that whilst 'we' don't have any direct volitional control, we are somehow able to choose not to act on the volitions that emerge from our multiple drafts of consciousness. It's been a while since I read Freedom Evolves, and I haven't got a copy handy (so forgive the lack of references), but I recall that something like this formed the centre of his compatiblist account of determinism and free will. In any case, I certainly didn't find his account convincing, for much the same reason that I have yet to find any (physicalist) account of free will convincing - none of them take determinism seriously enough. There's no such thing as partial determinism, unless you introduce randomness, and anybody who denies free will but then tells you how best to cope with this denial is simply being inconsistent.

In fact, without free will the very concept of any course of action being 'best' begins to lose a lot of its worth. How can I have any obligation to act one way rather than another, either morally or rationally, if I'm not able to meaningfully make that decision? Both conventional, rules-based moral philosophy and alternative approaches that emphasise "moral imagination" (Nussbaum 1985: 516) or "ethical attention" (Bowden 1998) suffer from this contradiction. In the first instance agency is removed when we are told that there is only one right answer to a dilemma - we no longer have any meaningful moral choice to make. On the latter view, to be moral is to live in a certain way, to be the kind of person who makes moral decisions - whatever those decisions may be. Here, again, we seem to lack ethical agency - either I am this kind of person or I am not, and when it comes to moral dilemmas I no longer have any choice, I simply act in the way that I must. Yet when I made this point in an essay, the marker insisted that "imagination is in part agential" - in which case, surely, the alternative approach simply collapses into the conventional, only with the critical choice being made prior to a dilemma, when an agent exercises their imagination. In my opinion he had fallen into a version of the trap that I outlined above, denying that morality was about freely willed decisions, but then simply reintroducing those decisions in another guise.

Of course, it is not anyone's fault when they make these mistakes, for they could not have chosen to do otherwise - could they?

• Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: OUP.
• Bowden, P. 1998. "Ethical Attention: Accumulating Understandings." European Journal of Philosophy 6/1: 59-77.
• Dennett, D. 2003. Freedom Evolves. Viking Books.
• Nussbaum, M. 1985. "'Finely Aware and Richly Responsible': Moral Attention and the Moral Task of Literature." Journal of Philosopy 82: 516-29.

Memes vs Genes

(by Joe)

The term "meme" was introduced by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976: 191-201), to refer to a proposed unit of cultural information analogous to the standard unit of genetic information: the gene. He suggested that evolutionary analysis of memes could cast light on cultural oddities that evolutionary genetics sometimes struggle to explain, such as religion. His original introduction of memes was a somewhat off-hand way of illustrating that evolution by natural selection need not only apply to DNA and biology, but almost by accident he invented an entirely new field. Memetics now refers to the study of evolutionary models of cultural information transfer, although whether or not this is something worthy of study is somewhat controversial. A Journal of Memetics was published online from 1997 to 2004 (and is still available), but probably the most famous account of memetics is Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (1999).

Everything looked a bit like this in the 90s.

The basic idea behind memetics is extremely simple. Just as we can understand biological evolution in terms of competition between genes, we can understand cultural evolution as competition between memes. A gene will survive not because it is necessarily useful to its host, but because it is useful to itself, driving the kind of adaptation that allows it to be passed on. So the genes of a (non-fertile) worker ant that sacrifices itself for the hive will be passed on through that ant's close genetic relatives.  A meme will survive not because it is necessarily useful to its host, but because it is useful to itself, perhaps by being memorable or easily passed on. An annoying song that you can't get out of your head might not derive any pleasure for you, the host, but it will survive. Analysing behaviour in terms of the benefit for the cultural meme allows us to provide explanations that might not be available at either the genetic or organism level.

Memetics has been criticised for failing to identify a discrete unit of transmission (a meme might be anything from a few notes to a whole philosophical theory), but as Blackmore points out the same can, in a sense, be said about genetics (1999: 53-6). The study of memes more generally is accused of being too vague, even pseudoscientific, and I agree that there is a genuine risk of failing to make any meaningful claims. However I think what matters is whether memetics is able to provide a useful account of phenomena where other fields have failed - and this will only become clear with time. Daniel Dennett's account of consciousness and the self includes a memetic element (1991: 199-226) and Blackmore hopes that memetics might cast light on everything from altruism (1999: 147-74) to the development of agriculture (ibid: 26-7). Whether or not memes actually exists (whatever "existing" means) is not really important - memetics as a discipline can still be provide a useful heuristic, reminding us that cultural practices might propagate themselves simply because that's what they do, not because they are in any way useful to us.


Blackmore, S. 1999. The Meme Machine. Oxford: OUP.

Dawkins, R. 1976 (2006). The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition. Oxford: OUP

Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown and Company.

Beyond Belief: Could Consciousness be Beyond our Ken?

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(by Jonny)

Consciousness is odd, I'll give you that. I tend to favour what you might call a deflationary account of Chalmers' “hard problem of consciousness”, that is the so-called problem of explaining the relationship between physical events like brain processes and the conscious experience of the world, the phenomenal “quality” of experience. I tend to favour the notion that the apparent incapability between a description of physical processes a description of first person “qualia” is only that, an apparent incapability. Given sufficient conceptual models, and sufficient knowledge of the processes at work, we will begin to see that consciousness is as an explicable natural phenomena as any other. Like other supporters of a deflationary account, I think we will explain away the hard problem by solving the easy ones,problems like how we discriminate, integrate information, report mental states etc.

Yet consciousness is nonetheless odd. Whether we like it or not, the phenomena is so special that has continued to persuade philosophers that it is is unique among perhaps all other phenomena, beyond physical or otherwise objective explanation. For this alone we have to give consciousness the respect of being marvellously teasing.

One philosopher for whom consciousness is especially mysterious is Colin McGinn. Via a position ominously labled “new mysterianism”, McGinn famously argues that consciousness may well be simply beyond our understanding. Human beings just do not have the capacity to solve the hard problem, the answers are beyond us.

Colin McGinn. Looking Mysterious.

I've always had a certain sympathy for this position. It has always struck me that, in principle, McGinn could be right. Though we might be motivated by different reason, I agree that it is possible that an understanding of consciousness is beyond human understanding. From my perspective, it seems to be right that there is a limit to human brain power, and that there could be, in principle, phenomena which to understand would take an amount of information processing beyond at least our current limit.

Where I disagree with this position is where it draws the line. It is tempting to say “we might not be able to explain consciousness” and confuse it with “we certainty cannot explain consciousness” and from there draw the conclusion “there's not point trying to explain consciousness”. I rather believe that this pessimistic line is too quick to jump the gun. Whilst it could be that consciousness is beyond us, there is no real reason to conclude it is in actual fact. I agree with Dennett's tone when says about this sort of view, “...just like Leibniz, they have offered nothing, really, in the way of arguments for their pessimistic conclusions, beyond a compelling image.” (2006:5).

Leibniz believed that when looking into our organic selves we would find only parts, like the machinery of a mill, and the mysteries of the mind would remain unexplained.

New Mysterianism does well to raise the possibility of human limitation and our possible arrogance of thinking we may, as a matter of principle, solve every theoretical problem. But it fails in lacking the reflection that it could be that we can. And that even if there are some unsolvable mysteries, consciousness isn't looking to such a specimen. It looks again like philosophers are too quick to grant consciousness a special status, too quick to exaggerate it's near supernatural nature.

In actual fact I believe we have come some way to explaining consciousness, and long may it continue. I for one am optimistic about the easy problems of the future.

Dennett, D (2006) Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness. MIT Press: Masachusetts

Reasons and Persons: Moral Immorality

(by Joe)

First off, a quick bit of background. I've decided to try and read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) over the summer. It's a thick book, and densely written, so it's going to take me a while. To keep me going I thought I'd blog about each chapter here, at least when I think that there's something the interesting to say. The book isn't really about the mind, or at least not its biological aspects, but I still think it's relevant to this blog. Parfit investigates ethics, rationality, and personal identity, all of which I consider to be closely related to cognition and the philosophy of mind. In fact, I think a lot of what Parfit's saying could maybe benefit from a closer interaction with the scientific study of the mind-brain-body(-environment?), which is part of what I'm going to try and discuss here.

Derek Parfit

Anyway, on with the show. I've just finished reading the first chapter, "Theories That Are Indirectly Self Defeating". One thing that particularly caught my attention was Parfit's notion of "moral immorality, or blameless wrongdoing" (1984: 32). I'm not entirely convinced that the notion is coherent, but he argues that one possible outcome of consequentialism could be that we are morally obliged to make ourselves disposed to act in an immoral manner. He gives the example of Clare, who faced with the choice of saving her child's life or the life of several strangers, will choose to save her child. Under most consequentialist frameworks, she will have acted wrongly - instead of one person dying, several have died - but she only acts this way because she loves her child, and in coming to love her child she may well have acted rightly. Thus we get a situation where she has done wrong, but not in any way that we would blame her for.

The reason that I'm not sure whether this is coherent is that whilst consequentialism might say that, broadly speaking, it is better to save several lives than save one life, it might also say that in this particular situation it is better to act in a way that preserves the possibility of love than to act in a way that does not. So perhaps Clare hasn't acted wrongly? However, coming back to something that I mentioned in my last post, I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that Clare has committed the action that is least wrong. Practical ethics isn't as simple as a binary choice between right and wrong, and often we will have to make extremely difficult moral decisions. In a sense it is this difficulty that characterises truly moral decisions, rather than simply doing what is obviously right. So whilst I wouldn't necessarily choose to use the precise terminology that he does, I think Parfit is on to something quite meaningful when he talks about moral immorality.

He goes on to make a distinction between what we ought morally to believe and what we ought intellectually to believe (Parfit 1984: 43). So whilst Clare ought morally to believe that her love for her child comes before preserving life (as will in fact result in the best possible world), she ought intellectually to believe that what is best is to save the most number of lives. This is a very similar distinction to that made by Joyce (2001), between moral truth and moral fiction. The distinction is that whilst Parfit retains a consequentialist moral realism on both sides, Joyce's dichotomy is between the apparent truth of moral irrealism, which means we should be error theorists about morality, and our pragmatically assenting to some kind of moral fictionalism in order gain some social advantage for ourselves. Joyce characterised the latter as assent rather than belief, but I suggested here that we might be better off viewing it as a separate system of belief, one which we only come to question under certain special circumstances. This would make Joyce's position even more similar to that of Parfit: we ought to convince ourselves to hold certain moral beliefs, even though we consider them intellectually flawed. The only difference is that whilst Parfit thinks we should do this in order to bring about the best possible world (whatever that is), Joyce thinks we should do it to benefit ourselves. In fact, earlier in the chapter Parfit makes precisely this claim, in discussing whether rational egoism might be indirectly self-defeating; he concludes that it is, because it tells us to act irrationally, but that this is not necessarily an argument against it. So Joyce's moral fictionalism is well supported by Parfit's account of rational egoism, even if Parfit doesn't think that, morally speaking, that is the position that we ought to hold.

Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

 

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition.)