Vacchablogga

What Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Excerpts

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” (33-4)

The cockles of Billy’s heart…were glowing coals. What made them so hot was Billy’s belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. (35)

…Billy told [a boy whose father was dead] matter-of-factly about his adventures on Tralfamadore, assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again.

“Isn’t that comforting?” Billy asked. (172)

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park…Billy predicts his own death within an hour. He laughs about it, invites the crowd to laugh with him…There are protests from the crowd…“If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.” (181)

Analysis

In the background of all these passages is eternalism, which says that the past, present, and future all exist. But what exactly about death is supposed to follow from eternalism?

Death doesn’t exist?

Billy’s statement that “when a person dies he only appears to die” suggests that he thinks death doesn’t exist if eternalism is true. The idea might be something like this:

If eternalism is true, then you never cease to exist.
If you never cease to exist, then you never die.
Therefore, if eternalism is true, then you never die.

But this is equivocating on “never cease to exist”. If eternalism is true, you never cease to exist only in the sense that there’s always some time, possibly in the past, at which you exist. But for you to never die, you need to never cease to exist in the sense that you exist at every future time.

To save the argument, you could try giving some non-standard analysis of “die” according to which you have died only if there’s no time, not even in the past, at which you exist. But I’m not going to be comforted by learning merely that I never die in this sense. There is still a time after which I never exist. Isn’t that bad, even if you decide not to call it “death”?

Death exists but isn’t bad?

It’s more productive to take for granted that death exists and ask how bad it is if eternalism is true. Billy himself does this at times, like when he predicts his own death but denies that it is terrible.

One standard view says that death is bad because it deprives us of good things. But Billy’s death will indeed deprive him of good things, whether or not eternalism is true, such as the happy days he would have gone on to live if he hadn’t died when he did.

Also, if death isn’t bad, then a life that lasts for a hundred happy years is no better than a life that lasts for only a single happy day. Billy presumably doesn’t believe this.

Death exists and is bad, but isn’t as bad as it would otherwise be?

The previous section notes that there is something that death deprives you of, whether or not eternalism is true. But maybe Billy’s idea is that there is also something that death doesn’t deprive you of if eternalism is true. If so, then although death might still be bad, it’s not as bad as it would be if eternalism were false.

It’s tempting to say that death doesn’t deprive you of your existence if eternalism is true. But it still does, just as I deprive you of $20 if I steal it from you, whether or not eternalism is true: there’s a time after which you don’t have it.

Maybe the idea is instead that death doesn’t deprive you of your past existence if eternalism is true. All those days you lived are still there, and no less real, even after you die.

OK, but how much better is this than the alternative? For example, compare the following two possibilities:

(E): Eternalism is true and you live 80 happy years before dying.

(P): Presentism is true and you live 80 * x happy years before dying.

The idea seems to be that if x = 1, then (E) is better than (P), but there’s some value of x which makes (E) and (P) equally good. The bigger this value is, the more eternalism blunts the badness of death.

The problem is that it’s not obvious how to defend the claim that if x = 1 then (E) is better than (P). I have a paper that tries to do this, but I think it mostly doesn’t work.

Death exists and is as bad as it otherwise would be, but we should still view it differently?

Billy’s focus seems to be more on comforting people than on assessing the objective badness of death. So how might eternalism comfort us, even if it has no implications for how bad death is?

Our concerns about death often are indexed to the time, such as being distressed, at 79, that you will die next year. This isn’t the same as being distressed that you will live for only 80 years. You might know all along that you will live for only 80 years, but it’s probably only as you get closer to 80 that you start to feel distressed. And even if your lifespan was 1,000,000 years, you’d feel the same sort of distress at year 999,999 if you knew you were going to die next year.¹

Eternalism alone can’t help with this feeling. We need to add to it the view that there is no objective passage of time. On this view, just as the universe has no privileged location, it also has no privileged time: “past” and “future” are like “up” and “down”.

What, then, does it mean for you to say, “I will die next year”? Merely that the timeslice of yours which makes that utterance is in a particular location in the 4D worm that constitutes you—that it is one year away from the edge of the worm. And there is nothing distressing about this, either from the perspective of the worm as a whole (which is static) or from the perspective of the timeslice (which lasts as long as any other timeslice, regardless of its location in the worm).

It’s tempting to imagine that a unique time is objectively present, and that eventually the objective present will tick forward to a future year, 20xx, in which you will die. But if there is no objective passage of time, this is mistaken. 2024 is no more objectively present than 2025, 3025, or 399 BC. If you’re worried about 20xx becoming objectively present, you are worried about something that, on this view of time, simply cannot happen. I think Billy is right to find this idea comforting.

Similar quotes from real people

Parfit’s note to a friend after the death of her husband:

I am very sorry to learn that Ray died a couple of weeks ago. When someone I loved died I found it helpful to remind myself that this person was not less real because she was not real now, just as people in New Zealand aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.²

Penrose, as characterized by a biographer, after his mother’s death:

Every moment in a relativistic life exists with equal reality, though we only experience them in sequence. The dead are never really gone, and the yet-to-be-born are already a part of the continuum. Roger’s loss was mitigated by the knowledge that the passage of time was a human illusion.³

Einstein after the death of a friend:

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.⁴

Academic work⁵

Le Poidevin (1995), ‘Time, Death and the Atheist’
Le Poidevin (1996), Arguing for Atheism, chapter 10
Burley (2008), ‘Should a B-Theoretic Atheist Fear Death?'
Deng (2015), ‘On Whether B-Theoretic Atheists Should Fear Death’
Story (2021), ‘Life and Death Without the Present’

To take an even more extreme case, even if your life stretched infinitely into the past, you’d still feel the same sort of distress if you knew you were going to die next year. This isn’t distress that you will live for “only” an infinitely long time. ↩︎
Quoted in Esmond’s Parfit biography, 323. ↩︎
From Barss’s Penrose biography, 202. ↩︎
Apparently originally from a 1955 letter. I got it from the Penrose biography. ↩︎
Most of this is quite bad and not worth reading. I’ve included it only for the sake of completeness. ↩︎

The doctrine of impermanence

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Buddhists accept the doctrine of impermanence, which says roughly that all things are impermanent. And they think that accepting this doctrine is an important step on the path to enlightenment. But what does it mean? Is it true? What are the likely psychological consequences of accepting it? And how should you act if it is true?

What does the doctrine mean?

Maybe simply: nothing lasts forever.

But that’s consistent things lasting for a very, very long time. If you tell me that I will live for “only” a million years, I’m not going to be disappointed.

Maybe Buddhists instead mean to assert the momentariness of all things: nothing lasts for more than a moment. But this is obviously false. For example, the chair that I’m sitting in has lasted for more than a moment. They probably don’t want to deny this.

Or maybe they mean to assert the dynamism of all things: nothing stays exactly the same from one moment to the next. This fits with what one commentator says:

We cannot say of anything, animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic, “this is lasting”; for even while we are saying this, it would be undergoing change.

But this is consistent with things changing only very slightly from one moment to the next. Maybe my chair is “dynamic” in that its internal temperature constantly fluctuates between 22.6671 degrees and 22.6672 degrees, with no other changes. But this change is insignificant. So long as its appearance and functionality remain the same, I don’t care.

A stronger version of the dynamism claim says that nothing is even a little similar from one moment to the next—that everything is always changing in every respect. But this is obviously false. For example, the number of kidneys I have has not changed in the last ten seconds.

…

Maybe this is missing the point. Set aside grand metaphysical claims and just think about humans. There are many good things which, at some level at least, we tend to expect to last longer than they actually do. Things like: our health, the pleasure from eating good meal, cell phone batteries, our looks, our intelligence, razor blades, our talents, friendships, our youth, socks, our lives, and so on.

It’s not that you’ll say you expect to live forever if someone asks you. It’s just that, when you finally learn that you’re going to die soon, you’re not going to shrug and say, “Yes, I knew all along that that was coming”. (Or if you do have this reaction, Buddhists will say you’re already pretty far on the path to enlightenment.) Instead, you’re likely to be distressed and feel like you’ve been given some terrible news.

So maybe Buddhists mean to assert the shortness of good things relative to our expectations: we tend to expect good things to last longer than they actually do.

Is it true?

If it just means that we tend to expect good things to last longer than they actually do, it’s at least plausible, if a little imprecise. On the other interpretations, it’s either obviously false (nothing lasts for more than a moment, everything is always changing in every respect) or plausible but vacuous (nothing lasts forever, everything is always changing in some respect).

What are the psychological consequences of accepting it?

Buddhists seem to think that if you believe something is impermanent, you’ll be less attached to it than you would otherwise be:

The perceiving of impermanence, bhikkhus, developed and frequently practiced, removes all sensual passion, removes all passion for material existence, removes all passion for becoming, removes all ignorance, removes and abolishes all conceit of “I am."¹

But I’m not so sure.

Imagine a couple that can meet for only one night before being separated forever. Is knowing that their time together is impermanent likely to reduce their sensual passion? Or think about how marketers like to say that a sale is for a limited time only. They think that learning of this impermanence will make you more passionate about buying the items on sale, not less.

Or think about someone who is diagnosed with a terminal illness and makes a bucket list. The list likely includes things that they could have done earlier, but simply didn’t care enough to do before they learned of their illness. Learning that their life will end soon makes them care more, not less, about doing these things.

…

Maybe this is missing the point. The above quote suggests that the perception of impermanence needs to be “developed and frequently practiced” in order for you to get the results it describes. So maybe the doctrine of impermanence is just supposed to be a tool you can use if you want to eliminate your attachments, but if you don’t use it in the right way, you won’t get that result.

You might still wonder how something that naturally tends to enflame people’s passions, as in the above examples, would be a useful tool for eliminating them. But people are complicated, and I don’t think it’s crazy to think that different people might have extreme opposite reactions to the perception of impermanence, or that you could deliberately nudge yourself into having one reaction or the other.

Of course, all this is just armchair speculation and you’d need to actually look at the evidence to see how accepting the doctrine affects people.

How should you act if it is true?

Buddhists seem to recommend that you avoid attachment to everything if the doctrine is true. The idea, I guess, is that this minimizes disappointment: if something is impermanent, then there’s a chance you’ll outlive it, and if you’re attached to it, then you’ll be disappointed if you’re still around when it’s gone.²

In some cases, this is the right strategy. For example, many cultures had a tradition of not naming newborn infants until a few months into their lives, presumably to avoid getting attached to them while there was a good chance they were just going to die (infant morality being extremely high throughout most of human history). The cost is that you give up some joy during the first few months of the infant’s life, but the benefit is that you suffer less if it dies. When infant morality is high enough, this is a good tradeoff to make. But of course no one recommends that you do this now, when infant morality is extremely low.

Instead of indiscriminately giving up attachments, the obvious strategy is to first figure out how long something is likely to last and then work out the expected value of allowing yourself to be attached to that thing, taking into account both your disappointment if you outlive it and the joy and other good things you get from being attached to it while it exists. If you do this, you’ll end up avoiding attachment to some but not all things.

Why isn’t this what Buddhists recommend? Maybe they think it’s too hard give up attachment to only some things, so you’re better off being a purist about it and avoiding attachment to everything, like a recovering alcoholic who refuses all drinks. But this is an extremely high cost to pay just to avoid disappointment, which isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Ignore the part about this removing all ignorance, which presumably isn’t meant literally. (How is learning that things are impermanent supposed to tell you the speed of light, or what I ate for breakfast, or the value of the first prime number greater than 100, or whether it will rain tomorrow?) ↩︎
Of course, this doesn’t apply to attachment to yourself, since you won’t be around when you’re gone. There is, however, still is time for disappointment in the period between learning that you’re going to die soon and your death. ↩︎

Deriving an 'is' from an 'ought'

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Philosophers sometimes draw descriptive conclusions from normative premises. In other words, they sometimes derive an ‘is’ from an ‘ought’. I think this is mistaken.

Note: I’m not talking about the other direction, deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, which is more often discussed.

Examples

Heller (2004) against modal realism: If modal realism is true, then we are never morally required to save drowning children. After all, if modal realism is true, then there will be the same total amount of good and bad in the universe no matter what we do. At most, we can change which of the infinitely many equally-real worlds is actual, which is merely an indexical fact that has no moral significance. But we are sometimes morally required to save drowning children. So modal realism is false.
??? against panpsychism: If panpsychism is true, then we are morally required to look out for the welfare of electrons. After all, if panpsychism true, then electrons are sentient, and sentience is sufficient for moral patienthood. But we are not morally required to look out for the welfare of electrons. So panpsychism is false.

Note: I don’t know of anyone who defends this argument in print. Gottlieb & Fischer (forthcoming) object to the argument, but they don’t object to its form. They just deny that panpsychism has consequences for how we are morally required to act because we don’t know enough about what affects the welfare of electrons.
Prior (1959) against eternalism: If eternalism is true, then you shouldn’t be relieved when bad things are in the past. After all, if eternalism is true, then the past, with all the good and bad things in it, is just as real as the present. But you should be relieved when bad things are in the past. So eternalism is false.
Bostrom (2006) against the unification thesis: If the unification thesis is true, then whether it is wrong to torture someone depends on whether there is an exact copy of that person’s brain somewhere else in the universe being tortured. After all, if there is such a copy, then according to unification, there will be no additional suffering if you torture the person. But it is wrong to torture someone whether or not there is an exact copy of their brain anywhere else in the universe being tortured. So the unification thesis is false.
Simon (2017) against manyism: If manyism is true, then the amount of concern you should have for an “experience cloud” (the set of many different conscious entities that, according to manyism, are associated with what would normally be regarded as a single person) increases exponentially with the corresponding brain’s mass. This is because, according to manyism, the number of conscious entities in an experience cloud increases exponentially with the brain’s mass. But all experience clouds should be given equal consideration, regardless of the corresponding brains' masses. So manyism is false.
Baggett and Walls (2016) for the existence of God: If God does not exist, then there are no objective moral truths. But there are objective moral truths. So God exists.¹
Hare (2009) for first-person realism: If first-person realism is false, then I’m not metaphysically special, in which case what’s best for me is not always what’s best for the world, in which case I don’t always have most reason to do what’s best for me. But I always have most reason to do what’s best for me. So first-person realism is true.²

The structure of the arguments

All of these arguments have normative premises and descriptive conclusions. Superficially, they are just instances of modus tollens, which is of course a valid form of argument:

D → N
~N
∴ ~D

Here D is a descriptive claim and N is a normative claim.

Note that D → N is itself a normative claim, so this form of argument not only rests on a normative premise but rests entirely on normative premises. (Though I think something fishy would be going on even if it had descriptive premises in additional to normative ones.)

Why the arguments fail

If this form of argument is valid, then why is it mistaken? Basically, because there’s no plausible way to defend both premises at the same time: (1) can be defended only if knowledge of D is prior to knowledge of N, but (2) can be defended only if N can be known independently of D.

I’ll work through one of the above arguments to make this more concrete, but I think parallel comments could be made about the other arguments.

Premise (1) of Heller’s argument says that if modal realism is true, then we are never morally required to save drowning children. His defense of this premise rests on the consequentialist assumption that our moral obligations depend solely on what state our actions leave the entire world. Crucially, this is inconsistent with the moral status of a particular action being something you can know without prior knowledge of its consequences.

Premise (2) of his argument says that we are sometimes morally required to save drowning children. But Heller can’t, and doesn’t, appeal to the consequences of saving downing children to defend (2), because these consequences are one of the things that is in question in the debate over modal realism. Instead, he simply takes (2) to be obvious. But given what he himself says in defending (1), to the extent to which we are uncertain about modal realism, we should also be uncertain about (2).

We can frame this as a dilemma. The truth of N either depends on D or not.

Horn 1: The truth of N depends on D. Then there is no non-question begging way to defend ~N, since any defense must take a stance on the truth of D.
Horn 2: The truth of N is independent of D. Then D → N is indefensible, since the only plausible defense of it rests on the assumption that the truth of N depends on the truth of D.

Heller’s argument is undermined by this dilemma, and I think the other example arguments are, too.³

To be clear, this dilemma applies only to arguments that fit the above pattern, including the details about how the premises can be plausibly defended. This is not something that follows simply from the logical form of the arguments. I’m not saying that every argument which uses modus tollens fails, which obviously isn’t true.

Further comments

The proponents of these arguments make much of the counterintuitive normative consequences of the given descriptive claims. But apart from examples 6 and 7, the descriptive claims from which the normative consequences follow are themselves counterintuitive. So there’s a perfectly good explanation of why, say, it’s counterintuitive that we are morally required to look out for the welfare of electrons if panpsychism is true: it’s because it’s also counterintuitive that electrons have welfare.

Maybe there are cases when counterintuitiveness counts against a normative view, but it doesn’t if there’s a perfectly good explanation of why it is counterintuitive. In most or all of these cases, there is such an explanation.
This form of argument is easy to parody. For example, suppose that I believe both that we have a moral obligation to help those in need if we are able to do so, and that I in fact have no moral obligation to give away money because there are no effective giving opportunities. Then someone gives me evidence that, actually, there are many effective giving opportunities. I then point to my moral beliefs to “prove” that this can’t be right: if there were such opportunities, then I would be morally required to do more than I believe I am morally required to do. Clearly something is going wrong here.
Intuitively, I’m motivated to reject these arguments simply because it seems obvious to me that normative beliefs aren’t a guide to physical reality. So I accept something like the following principle:

If you have a set of inconsistent descriptive and normative beliefs, you should always revise the normative beliefs to fit the descriptive beliefs, never the other way around.

Though, strangely, I didn’t need to appeal to any such principle in section 4 when arguing that the arguments are mistaken. This makes me suspect I didn’t identify the root problem with the arguments.
You might be tempted to object to this form of argument on normative anti-realist grounds. The idea is something like: normative claims aren’t really about the world, but are instead about us and our attitudes, so they aren’t a guide to objective features of the world.

But I don’t think that this is a good objection. Even if normative anti-realism is true, some combinations of normative claims are about objective features of world and not about us. For example, in saying (1) that utilitarianism is true and (2) that φ-ing is right, I’m committing myself to the descriptive claim (3) that φ-ing maximizes happiness. It makes no difference whether utilitarianism is objectively true.
Yalcin (2012), inspired by Forrester (1984), presents another argument that attempts to derive an ‘is’ from an ‘ought’: (1) if you are going to kill me, you should kill me gently, (2) you should not kill me gently (because you should not kill me at all), so (3) you are not going to kill me. The argument is clearly mistaken. Yalcin takes this as a reason to doubt the general validity of modus tollens (!). Anyway, I think that whatever is going wrong with this argument (probably a scope ambiguity) is different from what is going wrong with the above arguments.
Dorr (2002) also presents an argument which attempts to derive an ‘is’ from an ‘ought’: (1) if lying is wrong, the souls of liars will be punished in the afterlife, (2) lying is wrong, so (3) the souls of liars will be punished in the afterlife. He doesn’t claim that this argument is sound. He just claims that you could have reason to believe (1) and (2) (for example, on the basis of testimony) even if you don’t already accept (3), and that this would give you reason to accept (3). I think Dorr is right about this case, and what I say in section 4 would have to be complicated to accommodate this.

Note that testimony could give you good reason to accept the premises of all of the above arguments, too. My best guess at what’s going on here is that the person who is giving you the testimony needs to already have the relevant descriptive knowledge in order to be reliable, and their testimony tacitly includes this descriptive information. Since none of the proponents of the above arguments attempts to defend their premises on the basis of testimony, this won’t save any of them.⁴

I’m following the presentation of the SEP article on moral arguments for the existence of God. I haven’t read the book. ↩︎
Yes, this is as crazy as it sounds. Hare acknowledges without responding to the concern that this is wishful thinking (p. 57). In an endnote he refers to Heller’s argument against modal realism as an example of “is” from “ought” arguments in the philosophical literature (p. 102). ↩︎
There is a further argument that helps reinforce this dilemma. Suppose, against what the dilemma suggests, that both premises of the argument are a priori. So, in particular, ~N is a priori, along with D → N. Then the conclusion of the argument is also a priori, since it’s entailed by a priori premises. But the conclusion is a descriptive claim and so is a posteriori, not a priori. So at least one premise of the argument is a posteriori. Here it is most natural to say that it is ~N that is a posteriori, as suggested by horn 1 of the dilemma.

This argument isn’t completely decisive. The relevant descriptive claims at issue in the example arguments are the sort of claim that philosophers argue about from the armchair, so some philosophers might claim they’re a priori despite being descriptive. Still, this plausible for at most some of the descriptive claims (modal realism?), not all of them. For example, whether panpsychism is true depends on the true theory of consciousness, which had better be posteriori. ↩︎
I know of only two explicit discussions of ‘is’ from ‘ought’ arguments in the philosophical literature. The first is from Parfit in a Cogito interview (1995). Parfit considers and rejects the following argument: (1) some people deserve punishment, (2) if determinism is true, then no one deserves punishment, so (3) determinism is not true (p. 158). He doesn’t attribute this argument to anyone, but mentions it in response to a question about whether “our views about metaphysics are likely to depend on our views about ethics, rather than vice versa” (p. 157). Parfit goes on to say that, like me, he doubts that this sort of argument could ever work. The other brief discussion is from Richard Chappell in a blog post on moral cluelessness. Chappell mentions the same argument against determinism and, like Parfit, says that it doesn’t work. ↩︎

China trip 2023: Practical notes

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I visited China in early September 2023. Here are some practical notes about the experience.

Visa

You need a visa. There’s a long online application form to fill out. A professional passport photo is required.

After you’ve filled out the application form, you need to make an appointment with a Chinese consulate, where they will fingerprint you and review your application and its supporting materials (such as hotel reservations and flight bookings).

I received my visa in less than a week after going to the consulate, though I might have gotten lucky—my Chinese teacher told me that he had a student who waited months to receive his. They ended up giving me a multi-entry visa that is valid for three years, which is more than I asked for.

Payments

Credit cards are accepted virtually nowhere apart from hotels. If you want to reliably be able to pay for things, you must use WeChat Pay or AliPay. In my experience, WeChat Pay is slightly more popular, but most places accept both.

You can set up WeChat Pay and AliPay before arriving. This requires a credit card and passport. During the setup process, you might see popups which tell you that you must have a Chinese bank account to continue. Ignore them. Your account won’t get activated until your identity is verified, but in my experience this has never taken more than an hour or so.

To avoid the terrible exchange rate offered by my credit card company, I configured WeChat Pay and AliPay using a card from Wise instead of my regular credit card. This had the added benefit of making it easy to monitor payments and prevent fraudulent charges.

Making a payment with WeChat Pay or AliPay requires an internet connection, so ensure that your phone has a data plan.

In some cases, using WeChat Pay or AliPay also requires the ability to receive text messages to validate your phone number. I never encountered this when making normal payments in stores or taxis, but I frequently encountered it when trying to use restaurants' menu apps, which are typically integrated into WeChat or AliPay. Since my Chinese SIM card supported data only, I was prevented from using these apps, which annoyed both me and the servers at the restaurants I went to.

My sense is that most merchants will accept cash if you ask, but since cash is rarely used, they might not be able to provide you with change. ATMs exist, though are somewhat less common than what I’ve seen in the U.S. and Canada.

Internet restrictions

Many Western sites are blocked. I found the Google block, which includes Gmail, the most annoying to deal with. The Gmail block in turn blocked me from accessing any website which sends validation emails to my Gmail account as part of the sign in process, such as my airline’s website. To mitigate this, I configured my Gmail account to forward all messages to an alternative email account I have with Microsoft, so I wouldn’t be totally screwed if my VPN stopped working.

Also included in the Google block is Google Translate¹, Google Maps², Google Photo’s OCR functionality (which is essential if you want to be able to copy Chinese characters that you can’t read), Google Drive, and even GCP. Social logins with Google—the thing where you can click “Sign in with Google” on random sites that are unaffiliated with Google—are also blocked.

If you want to get by without a VPN, you can mostly substitute Microsoft and Apple apps for Google ones, and configure your Gmail account to forward new emails to a non-blocked email service, though you’ll still be blocked from accessing any site which you need to use Google to login to.

Language

Despite the fact that I was clearly a foreigner and stayed mostly in big cities around international hotels, nearly everyone spoke to me in Chinese and seemed to assume that I would be able to understand what they were saying. Since I can in fact can speak some Chinese, I could manage, though those who know little or no Chinese will have a harder time.

When I needed to fall back to using English people generally understood me, but often preferred to reply by pointing to translations on their phones instead of speaking English.

Restaurants

Menus are usually available via WeChat or AliPay, accessible by scanning a QR code. Ordering is also done through the menu apps. Physical menus are usually available on request, but won’t be provided unless you ask for them.

By default, you will be given tea or hot water to drink. Cold water must be explicitly requested, and sometimes isn’t available even on request. (At one restaurant, I asked for 冰水, which literally means “ice water” but which I was taught is taken to mean “cold water”. The server was so confused by this request that she brought me a bowl of ice cubes.) Napkins are not always provided.

Washrooms

Squat toilets are common, though occasionally you might luck out and find a Western-style toilet. If you’ve never used a squat toilet before, learn how to use one before you arrive. International hotels have Western-style toilets. Bullet trains are hit-or-miss. (Of the two bullet trains I took, one had a squat toilet and one had a Western-style toilet.)

Toilet paper is rarely provided in public washrooms and you are expected to bring your own. I was told this by multiple people before arriving but couldn’t bring myself to fully believe it.

On the bright side, public washrooms are common and clearly marked.

Transportation

Buses and subways

You can pay for buses and subways using AliPay. When it works, it’s easy to setup and use. I was able to get this working in some cities, but not in Beijing (apparently because I had a foreign AliPay account). As an alternative, you can buy tickets from self-service machines in subway stations, but these machines are only in Chinese and very complicated.

For navigation guidance on buses and subways, you need to use 百度地图 (Baidu Maps), which is available only in Chinese.

Taxis

In the major cities that I visited, taxis were common and easy to hail. I encountered no obvious discrimination for being a foreigner, which would have been understandable, given the potential difficulties with language and payments. All of the taxi drivers I encountered, with the exception of one in Beijing, were scrupulously honest. Prices are extremely cheap compared to the U.S. and Canada: a 15 minute taxi ride might cost less than taking the subway in Toronto.

Don’t expect any drivers to speak English. If you don’t speak Chinese, make sure the address of your destination is written down somewhere in Chinese.

弟弟 (Didi) is the Uber of China. You can access it through AliPay, which is available in English. Unfortunately, I was never able to get it to work, apparently because my only payment method was a foreign credit card.

Bullet trains

I used Trip.com, which is owned by a Chinese company, for booking bullet train tickets. This is apparently the English version of the website that Chinese people use to book bullet train tickets.

Domestic flights

I also used Trip.com for booking domestic plane tickets. For some reason this was significantly cheaper than booking directly on the airline’s own website.

Tickets (for trains, museums, etc.)

Museum ticket booking is typically done through WeChat mini apps. Often these apps are in Chinese only, and annoying don’t let you copy text, making translation more difficult. Often, independently of translation issues, I was unable to book tickets using WeChat. Apparently this had something to do with me having a foreign WeChat account, but I never figured out exactly what the problem was.

There’s an English-language website which you can book certain tickets through, but they charge a heavy premium and cannot book same-day tickets. I assume this is because they need time to manually book the ticket on your behalf. WeChat is better if you can manage it.

IDs are often used as proof of purchase in lieu of tickets. This means that at the entrance to the museum, train station, or whatever, your ID will be scanned and you don’t need to display a ticket. If you don’t have a Chinese ID, you use your passport, and someone will usually need to manually enter its number. Sometimes there is a separate line for people whose IDs can’t be automatically scanned.

Cell phone service

I bought a Chinese SIM card before arriving, because my Canadian cell phone provider charges exorbitant roaming rates. Service was fast and reliable across multiple provinces.

The SIM card that I bought included only data, not calling or texting. In retrospect this was a mistake, for the reason I note above: some apps, especially restaurants' menu apps, require phone number validation before use.

Covid restrictions

Zero Covid is very much over and masking is, if anything, less common than what I’ve seen in the West. (And many of the people who mask in China do so to limit exposure to the sun or pollution, not to avoid Covid.) I did not visit a single place where masking rules were enforced.

No Covid test is required before entering, though when I went you were still required to fill out entry and exit health forms, which note any Covid-like symptoms you have. You can fill this out either on a website, which I couldn’t get to work, or through WeChat. Once you fill it out, you get a QR code that they scan when you go through border security.

Traffic safety

Scoters are common and seem to be exempt from red light laws. It’s not that one or two will run a red light every now and then. It’s that there is a constant stream of them riding at full speed through every red light. I’m still not sure whether this is rampant lawlessness or whether scoters can, for reasons that escape me, legally do this. Anyway, if you don’t want to get hit, be prepared to jump out of the way of them when crossing the street, whether or not the crosswalk light tells you you can go.

You can save languages for offline use with the Google Translate mobile app, but this didn’t work well for me—there was always a long lag before a translation would appear, and the text to speech function was broken. ↩︎
In most cases Google allows you to download maps for offline use, but has decided without explanation to disallow this for China. ↩︎

Claims about nihilism

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

(Here ‘nihilism’ is the view that nothing is good or bad.)

It can be reasonable to find nihilism disappointing. Some people argue that it’s unreasonable to find nihilism disappointing, since if nothing is good or bad, then it’s not bad that nothing is good or bad. But even if something isn’t bad, it might be less good than you thought or hoped. If you go from thinking that the world is full of good things to thinking that nothing is good, it’s reasonable to be disappointed.
It can be reasonable to find nihilism relieving. Same idea as (1): If nothing is good or bad, then it’s not good that nothing is good or bad. But things might still be less bad than you thought or feared. If you go from thinking that the bad in the world outweighs the good to thinking that nothing is bad, it’s reasonable to be relieved.
You should act as if nihilism is false. There is a simple dominance argument: If nihilism is true, it makes no difference whether you act as if it is true. But if nihilism is false, you’ll be better off if you act as if it is false.
1. This argument has been challenged, but the basic idea is still probably right.

So-called optimistic nihilism is incoherent. Optimistic nihilists present nihilism as an exciting opportunity to “make your own meaning” and “discover what makes you happy”. But if nihilism is true, then neither of these things is good. It would make just as much sense for them to tell you to discover what makes you sad and do that. Also, among the people who made their own meaning are Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.
The best argument against nihilism is simply that some things seem obviously good or bad. For example, it seems obvious that happiness is good and suffering is bad.
Most popular arguments for nihilism are terrible. These include: that humans occupy only a tiny fraction of the universe, that there is no God, that humans lack free will, and that humans are mortal. The premises of these arguments may be true, but they do nothing to support nihilism.
1. Size: If humans came to occupy, say, 76.3% of the universe as opposed to less than 0.000000001% of it, would happiness then magically become good? If only a single person existed, would their torture not be bad because they aren’t physically big enough?
2. Atheism: If you start out thinking that happiness is good, why should you stop thinking that happiness is good if you become an atheist? It’s silly to think, “Happiness is good, but only because God says so”. Would happiness be bad if God had said so?
3. No free will: If suffering is bad, then the suffering of non-human animals, which lack free will, is bad too. This doesn’t change if it turns out that humans also lack free will.
4. Mortality: That all apparently good (bad) things will come to an end does not entail that nothing is good (bad). If you torture me for a thousand years and then kill me, my suffering is just as bad even though I die at the end of it.¹

Nihilism is probably true.

Two recurring mistakes in these arguments are (i) conflating cosmic significance with value, and (ii) thinking that the value of an intrinsic good or bad depends on its location in space or time. Size and Atheism (and maybe No free will) might show that we are cosmically insignificant. Size and Mortality show something about the position of human happiness and suffering in space (Size) and time (Mortality). The rebuttals mostly emphasize the problems with (i) and (ii). ↩︎

Book review: Nine Cloud Dream

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Synopsis

A promising young Buddhist monk, Hsing-che, is serving under Master Liu-kuan. Master Liu-kuan specializes in the Diamond Sutra, which says that there’s no difference between dreams and reality.

One day, Master Liu-kuan asks Hsing-che to pay his respects to the Dragon King. Hsing-che goes to the Dragon King’s palace and gets drunk despite the fact that monks aren’t supposed to drink. On his way back he jumps into a lake to try to sober up, but bumps into eight fairies who are relaxing by the lake after paying their respects to Master Liu-kuan. He flirts with them before returning, very late, to the temple.

Upon returning, Hsing-che tries to meditate but keeps on thinking about the fairies. His attempt to meditate is interrupted when he gets called before his master, who is furious and somehow knows everything that’s happened. His master sends him to the underworld to be judged, where he is sentenced to be reborn as punishment. Meanwhile, the same thing has happened to the eight fairies, who somehow got caught flirting with Hsing-che.

The rest of the novel is about the nine of them finding each other in their next lives after being reborn. Since their rebirths were a punishment, this part of the novel naturally involves a lot of pain and suf—actually, no.

Hsing-che, reborn as Shao-yu, ends up getting everything anyone could conceivably desire. He comes first place in the state exams, is second only to the emperor in political power, and is rich and handsome. Oh, and he repeatedly has sex with the fairies and other beautiful women, sometimes more than one at a time, and all eight fairies end up becoming his wives or concubines. You’d think that this might at least lead to some conflict among the wives and concubines, but it doesn’t. Everyone is completely happy with this arrangement, Shao-yu most of all.

Shao-yu eventually retires, and a few years later decides to become a monk. Then he wakes up as Hsing-che, back in the old Buddhist temple, and is soon joined by the eight fairies, who have becomes nuns. Master Liu-kuan appoints Hsing-che as his successor, and after some time Hsing-che and the eight fairies become bodhisattvas and enter, together, into paradise.


Cover art by Feifei Ruan

So, like, what is going on with this novel? Professional reviews generally speak of it as if it’s a Buddhist morality tale. And the novel does repeatedly highlight the main idea of the Diamond Sutra, that there is no difference between dreams and reality. In addition to the dreamlike start and end to Hsing-che’s reincarnation, the novel describes humans being confused with fairies and ghosts, boys pretending to be girls, girls pretending to be boys, time advancing suddenly like in a dream, and so on. So there is one Buddhist idea that the novel at least illustrates.

But I think this misses how startlingly anti-Buddhist the rest novel is. I’ll focus on three main anti-Buddhist themes in it.

Themes

Uselessness of meditation

The novel says that “the great purpose of Buddhism [is] to tame the mind and the heart”. But in the case of Hsing-che, it’s completely failed to achieve this purpose. After being reborn as Shao-yu, he lives a life almost comically dominated by sex, drunkenness, and the pursuit of power.

And it’s not like Hsing-che is just some random Buddhist. He spent a decade in a monastery studying under a great master whose name literally means “Master of the Six Temptations”. We’re told that Hsing-che is his best student out of hundreds, and everyone expects him to be made his master’s successor. If at the end of all this meditation and study Hsing-che is still fantasizing about a lifetime of sex with fairies, it doesn’t look like meditation and study are very helpful in “tam[ing] the mind and the heart”.

In the end, Shao-yu’s desires do fade and he awakes again as Hsing-che. But that’s not because of Buddhist meditation or study, which there is no mention of him doing as Shao-yu. It’s because he spent an entire lifetime having sex with whoever he wanted. The moral of the story seems to be the anti-Buddhist moral of The Picture of Dorian Grey: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

Irrelevance of karma

Shao-yu often attributes his happiness to karma. But he is wrong, since he has bad karma and was sentenced to be reborn in the first place only as a punishment for violating his religious vows. The repeated mentions of karma just serve to highlight that in the novel’s universe, karma doesn’t impact the quality of your later lives, and those who confidently attribute outcomes to it have no idea what they’re talking about.¹

Nihilist consequences of Buddhist metaphysics

There are two separate occasions on which Shao-yu has sex with creatures who are not fully human, or who he believes are not fully human. One he believes (incorrectly, it turns out) to be a “hungry ghost”, and so by having sex with her he believes he is having sex with an animated corpse. The other is a half-fish who has the power to transform into a full human, but Shao-yu doesn’t want to wait for that and has sex with her while she is still a half-fish.

In both cases the creatures appear to be a little grossed out on Shao-yu’s behalf. For example, before having sex with him for a second time, the supposed hungry ghost asks him, “How could I dare to embrace you again with this rotting corpse?”

This is where Buddhist teachings come to the rescue. Shao-yu responds by quoting the Buddha:

The Buddha said a man’s body is a transitory illusion, like foam on the water or flower petals in a gust of wind…Who can say, then, what really exists and what does not?

To reiterate, this is to justify having sex with what he believes to be a rotting corpse.

This is particularity striking because Buddhist texts sometimes compare humans to corpses in order to quell people’s desire for sex. For example, the Bodhicaryāvatāra encourages you to think of someone you sexually desire as merely a “cage of bones bound by sinew” and a “moving corpse” (chapter VIII, verses 52 and 70). Shao-yu turns this on its head, saying in effect: I agree that these two things are alike, but I choose to revise my opinion of corpses instead of my opinion of humans.

The more general point this is getting at is that Buddhist metaphysics doesn’t necessarily have the practical consequences that Buddhists take it to have. If life is just a “transitory illusion”, then why does it matter whether Shao-yu is having sex with a human or with a corpse? Why does anything really matter? Why shouldn’t you just have a good time? Isn’t that what you would try to do in an actual dream, and wouldn’t that be OK? So how seriously do Buddhists really take the idea that life is just a “transitory illusion”?

Appendix: What does the Diamond Sutra actually say?

The Diamond Sutra has two main themes. The first is, roughly, that there is no difference between dreams and reality, as summed up in this famous passage from it:

All things conditioned
are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows
like dewdrops, like a flash of lightning,
and thus shall we perceive them.²

In other translations I’ve seen “compounded” instead of “conditioned”. This passage is a little more nuanced than my earlier glosses on it. Two obvious questions are (1) What does it mean for something to be conditioned? and (2) In what respects are conditioned things supposed to be like the given examples (dreams, illusions, and so on)? A third obvious question is (3) Why should we believe this?

As best I can tell, something counts as “conditioned” if it is non-fundamental. On this understanding, the vast majority of things are conditioned: you, me, tables, Greek yogurt, the metric system, and so on. The only unconditioned things are those at the fundamental level—maybe quarks or some more fundamental particles that we don’t yet know about. In the sutra itself, it’s clear that persons, living beings, sounds, smells, and tastes, among other things count as conditioned, which fits this interpretation.

As for (2), the given examples have a few distinctive qualities, though no quality is an obviously good fit for all of them. The examples are variously:

short-lived (dreams, bubbles, dewdrops, flashes of lightning, maybe shadows)
“immaterial” in some sense (dreams, illusions, shadows, maybe lightning)
mind-dependent (dreams, illusions)
“unreal” in some sense (dreams, illusions)

So the Diamond Sutra is claiming that all conditioned things have some or all of the above qualities.

As for (3), why we should believe this, the Diamond Sutra is silent. That’s unfortunate, since on its face it seems obviously false. For example, our best science says that the Sun (which counts as “conditioned”) has existed for around 4.6 billion years. That is not short-lived by any stretch of the imagination. And since the Sun exited before we did, it definitely isn’t dependent on our minds. Is the Diamond Sutra denying this? If so, it would be nice to know why.

So much for the first theme. The second main theme of the Diamond Sutra is that the Diamond Sutra is great and you are great if you study it. Here’s one representative passage:

The Lord said, “…[I]f there were as many world-systems as there would be grains of sand in those Ganges Rivers, and some woman or man were to fill them with the seven treasures and make a gift of them to the Realized, Worthy and Perfectly Awakened Ones…would that woman or man generate a lot of merit on that basis?”

Subhūti said, “A lot, Lord, a lot, Blessed One….”

The Lord said, “If, however, someone were to fill that many world-systems with the seven treasures and make a gift of them, Subhūti, and if someone were to do no more than learn just a four-lined verse from this round of teachings and teach it to others, the latter would generate from that a lot more merit, an immeasurable and incalculable amount.

It goes on like this. By my count, 25% of the Diamond Sutra (8 of 32 sections) is devoted to some form of self-praise or an attempt to express an absurdly large number that represents how much merit you’ll get if you study it.

Complication: The Diamond Sutra promises all those who study even four verses of it “an immeasurable and incalculable amount” of merit (§11). So maybe Shao-yu does have good karma, despite the fact that his master was trying to punish him. But this just highlights the strangeness of that teaching. Does it mean that if you study the Diamond Sutra, you can murder a thousand people and still have a good rebirth? It’s like a cheat code for infinite karma. ↩︎
When I took a Buddhist philosophy class at a local monastery, the monk recited this passage in an opening prayer before every class. ↩︎

Theism and functionalism

Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Claim

If theism and functionalism are true, then there’s at least a 50% chance you are literally an idea in the mind of God.

Argument

If theism is true, then there is an omniscient god. If there is an omniscient god, then he knows everything that is going on in your brain, down to the finest detail. This is akin to running a complete simulation of your brain. But if functionalism is true, then a complete simulation of a brain has exactly the same experiences as the brain being simulated. So if theism and functionalism are true, there are two beings undergoing your exact experiences: one in the real world, and one in God’s mind. By the self-sampling assumption, it’s 50-50 which one you are.

Corollaries

Actually, the chance of you being an idea in the mind of God is probably much greater than 50% if theism and functionalism are true. That’s because of two corollaries to the argument in the previous section:

Since God also has complete knowledge of every non-realized possibility, all the people in these non-realized possibilities exist in his mind (though not in the real world)
Since God also has complete knowledge what has happened in the past and what will happen in the future, all people involved in these events exist in his mind even after they have died or before they will be born

Given these two points, there are significantly more instances of you in God’s mind than in the actual world, so it’s extremely likely that you are an idea in God’s mind. (Cf. the simulation argument.)

Assessment

Is the argument sound? As stated, probably not. The problem is with the move from God knowing everything that is going on in your brain to him simulating your brain. One way of representing knowledge of something is with a simulation, but that’s not the only way. Imagine a book that describes, for each time, the complete physical state of my brain at that time. If someone memorizes that book, then they know everything that is going on at my brain at every time, but there’s no simulation involved.

In response, a proponent of the argument could claim that although memorizing these things might count as knowing everything that happens to my brain, it wouldn’t count as understanding everything that happens to it. Understanding something arguably requires being able to explain and predict what happens to it. And to be able to explain and predict what happens to something, you arguably need to be able to represent it in a way that amounts to a simulation. If we add to this the claim that omniscience requires full understanding in addition to full knowledge, the argument from section 2 might be saved.

There are still questions here. For example, to count as understanding something in this sense, do you need to be constantly simulating it, or do you just need to be in a position to simulate it if you want to, say, answer a question about it? In general, it seems like you just need to in a position to simulate the thing. But if you are omniscient, and fully understand everything at all times in the deepest possible sense, it’s more plausible that you would need to be running these sorts of simulations constantly.

How strong is the fading qualia argument?

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

The fading qualia argument is one popular argument for functionalism about consciousness (just ‘functionalism’ for short). The best presentation of the argument is in a paper by Chalmers, which you should read before reading the rest of this post.¹

Very simplified summary of the argument: Imagine someone replaces the neurons in your brain one by one with silicon that functions in exactly the same way as the neurons. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that functionalism is false. Then at some point your experiences will be either faded or gone entirely. Nonetheless, you will judge that there has been no change in your experiences, since your judgments about your experiences are determined entirely by your functional states.² So at some point you will be systematically out of touch with your experiences despite suffering from no “functional pathology”. But this isn’t possible. So functionalism is true.

Here’s what I take to be the key premise of the argument:

(F) It is not possible for a “rational being that is suffering from no functional pathology to be systematically out of touch with its experiences”.³

Why should we accept (F)?

Empirical evidence

Chalmers suggests that we have empirical evidence for (F):

In every case with which we are familiar, conscious beings are generally capable of forming accurate judgments about their experience, in the absence of distraction and irrationality. For a sentient, rational being that is suffering from no functional pathology to be so systematically out of touch with its experiences would imply a strong dissociation between consciousness and cognition. We have little reason to believe that consciousness is such an ill-behaved phenomenon, and good reason to believe otherwise.

One of the most salient empirical facts about conscious experience is that when a conscious being with the appropriate conceptual sophistication has experiences, it is at least capable of forming reasonable judgments about those experiences. Perhaps there are some cases where judgment is impaired due to a malfunction in rational processes, but this is not such a case.

But I think things are not so clear. In the rest of this section, I’ll consider:

Whether we actually have empirical evidence that rational, focused (I’ll omit these qualifications going forward) humans are reliable judges of their experiences.
Whether, if humans are reliable judges of their experiences, it follows that (F) is true.
Whether we could even in principle have empirical evidence for (F) over competing principles.

My answers are (1) maybe some, but not much, (2) no, and (3) no.

Do we have empirical evidence that humans are reliable judges of their experiences?

I think we have at best little empirical evidence that humans are reliable judges of their experiences.

The problem is that our primary evidence of what people are experiencing is their judgments of what they are experiencing, as reported by them to us. And it would obviously be question-begging to argue, “Dave judged that he is experiencing redness, so—assuming that he is a reliable judge of his experiences—he really is experiencing redness, so his judgment that he is experiencing redness is accurate. [Repeat a few times.] So he is a reliable judge of his experiences.”

You might instead try to use your own experiences and judgments about them as evidence that you, at least, are a reliable judge of your experiences, and then generalize from that. But I don’t think this works, either. It would be nearly as question-begging as the previous argument to argue, “I judged that I am experiencing redness, and—assuming that I am a reliable judge of my experiences—I can tell directly that I really am experiencing redness, so my judgement that I am experiencing redness is accurate…”.

There is other evidence we could try to rely on, which I consider in a footnote,⁴ but I don’t think it gets us very far.

If humans are reliable judges of their experiences, does it follow that (F) is true?

But even if humans are reliable judges of their experiences, it doesn’t follow that (F) is true. To see this, it helps to compare (F) with a different principle, which will likely be accepted by those who reject (F):

(M) It is not possible for a rational being (i) that is suffering from no functional pathology and (ii) that is is and always has been made out of the sort of material that humans are made out of to be systematically out of touch with its experiences.

The problem is that the mere fact that humans are reliable judges of their experiences does nothing to support (F) over the more modest (M). After all, humans (so far) are and always been made out of the material that humans are actually made out of, as opposed to, say, silicon. So it’s consistent with the fact that humans are currently reliable judges of their experiences that if the material that they are made out were to change, then their judgments about their experiences would become unreliable.⁵

Is there possible empirical evidence for (F)?

And it’s not just that we don’t, in fact, have empirical evidence for (F) over (M). It’s that we couldn’t possibly have empirical evidence for (F) over (M). This is a point Chalmers himself makes later in the paper:

It is not out of the question that we could actually perform such an experiment [of replacing the neurons in someone’s brain with functionally identical silicon]…But of course there is no point performing the experiment: we know what the result will be. I will report that my experience stayed the same throughout, a constant shade of red, and that I noticed nothing untoward.

So whatever reason we have to accept (F) over (M) can’t be empirical evidence, since we’d expect to have exactly the same empirical evidence whether (F) is true or (M) is true.⁶

Other principles like (F)

(F) says that it’s impossible for a “rational being that is suffering from no functional pathology” to be systematically out of touch with one specific part of reality—its own experiences. But note that it is not impossible for rational beings to be systematically out of touch with reality more generally. For example, if I was turned into a brain in a vat last night, then I’m now systematically out of touch with my surroundings, despite being no less rational than before. So a generalized version of (F) is false:

(F*) It is not possible for a rational being that is suffering from no functional pathology to be systematically out of touch with reality.

(F*) is false because most parts of reality are not determined entirely by our rationality or functional states, and so they can vary independently of each other. In the envatting example, my rationality and functional states are held constant while my surroundings change.

Given this, a restricted version of (F*) is plausible only if the relevant part of reality is determined entirely by our rationality or functional states. Of course, this is precisely what functionalists think about experiences. But asserting (F) to argue for functionalism now starts to look question-begging, since (F) is plausible only if functionalism is true.

On the other hand, if you stare at any deductively valid argument for long enough, it starts to look question-begging, so I don’t think that this is a problem with the argument. The important point is just that (F) shouldn’t be taken as obvious or something that follows from a plausible more general principle about rational beings.

Skepticism about our experiences

Another option is to give up trying to provide evidence for (F), and instead argue that we should accept (F) because some sort of skepticism about our own experiences follows if (F) is false. This skepticism could be used as part of a practical argument for accepting (F) when developing a theory of consciousness, as I explain in the next section.

Why think that this skepticism follows if (F) is false? Well, suppose that (F) is false—that it is possible for a rational being that is suffering from no functional pathology to be systematically out of touch with its experiences. Then, to avoid skepticism, we need to come up with some reason to think that we ourselves are not such beings. But it’s not obvious how to do this.

We can’t appeal to empirical evidence that humans are reliable judges of their experiences, because there is no strong empirical evidence of this (see section 2.1).

We can’t appeal to considerations of parsimony,⁷ because there isn’t anything especially unparsimonious about the hypothesis that our judgments about our experiences are systematically mistaken because of the stuff we’re made out of.

We can’t appeal to evolution, because a being that is a reliable judge of its experiences has no greater reproductive fitness than a functionally identical being that is systemically mistaken about its experiences.

The best bet might be to try to find some general reason to think that, although it is possible for a being to be systematically out of touch with its experiences because of the material it is made out of, this is very unlikely. For example, maybe 99% of materials support consciousness, and only 1% don’t. So there is only a 1% chance that we would be made out of a material that fails to support consciousness and would be inaccurate judges of our experiences as a result. But I have no idea how we could learn what percentage of materials support consciousness if functionalism is false.⁸

Practical consequences

So suppose that if (F) is false, then some sort of skepticism about our experiences follows. What are the practical consequences of this?

One practical consequence is arguably that we have good reason to accept (F) when developing a theory of consciousness, even if we don’t have good evidence for (F). After all, we need to rely on knowledge of our own experiences when developing a theory of consciousness. So if (F) is false, and skepticism about our own experiences follows from this, then we can’t develop a theory of consciousness. So when we are developing a theory of consciousness, it’s reasonable to assume that (F) is true, because otherwise we have no hope of succeeding.⁹

But it’s important not to jump to the conclusion that in every case this gives us good reason to act like (F) is true, or act like functionalism—which, together with the fading qualia argument, (F) entails—is true. For example, I don’t think that anything I’ve said gives us good reason to act like functionalism is true when considering whether to try upload our minds to computers, or when considering whether we should treat advanced AIs with the respect that we should treat conscious beings with.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose that when developing a drug we had, for whatever reason, to make some assumption about its pharmacology. We have no evidence for the assumption—it’s just that we had no hope of succeeding in developing this drug if the assumption is false. Suppose further that if the assumption is true, then the drug is safe and effective. Should this make you feel OK about taking the drug if its safety and efficacy hasn’t been verified? I don’t think so.

If we can’t come up with any actual evidence for (F), or any better argument for functionalism, I think we should feel the same way about mind uploading. And I think the mere fact that we should act like (F) is true when doing philosophy of mind shouldn’t, without further argument, affect our treatment of intelligent AIs.¹⁰

Conclusion

Here’s a summary of my key claims:

We don’t and couldn’t have empirical evidence for (F) over (M)
(F) can’t be supported by appeal to a more general principle connecting rationality to true beliefs, because in general there is no necessary connection between the two
Skepticism about our experiences arguably follows if (F) is false
If skepticism about our experiences does follow if (F) is false, then although this might give us reason to accept (F) when developing a theory of consciousness, it doesn’t give us reason to accept (F) in other circumstances

If all this is right, then how strong is the fading qualia argument? Strong enough to give us practical reason to accept functionalism when doing philosophy of mind, but not strong enough to give us epistemic reason to accept functionalism, or practical reason to accept functionalism in other cases (such as when deciding whether to try to upload our minds to computers).

By ‘functionalism about consciousness’, I mean the view that Chalmers calls ‘the principle of organizational invariance’ in his paper. In the paper, Chalmers also presents a strengthened version of the fading qualia argument called ‘the dancing qualia argument’, but the points I want to make apply equally to both arguments. A similar presentation of the argument is in Chalmers' The Conscious Mind (1996), chapter 7. The fading qualia argument has some influence outside of philosophy. For example, Karnofsky appeals to it in a recent post on the future of humanity. ↩︎
The argument would still work if we substituted the more modest premise that your judgments about whether your experiences have changed over time are determined entirely by your functional states. The stronger premise in the main text might be denied by those (including Chalmers himself) who think that your judgments about the experiences you are having at a given time can be constituted in part by the experiences themselves. If this is right, then your judgments about your experiences are determined entirely by your functional states only if your experiences themselves are also determined entirely by your functional states—and it would be obviously question-begging for a proponent of this argument to assume that they are. ↩︎
All quotes in this post are from Chalmers' paper. ↩︎
Three other possible sources of evidence:
- Consistency: If I first judge that, at noon today, I experienced only redness, and then a minute later judge that, at noon today, I experienced only blueness, at least one of my judgments is false. If regularly make inconsistent judgments about my experiences, then I must be unreliable judge of my experiences, regardless of what my exact experiences are. Conversely, if I never make inconsistent judgments about my experiences, this is at least some (weak) evidence that I am a reliable judge of my experiences.
- Non-verbal behavior: Use someone’s non-verbal behavior to figure out what they are experiencing, and then compare this to their reported judgments. If I show obvious pain-behavior (say, wincing and screaming) but judge that I am not experiencing anything unpleasant, that’s evidence that I’m an unreliable judge of my experiences. Conversely, if there never is any mismatch between the experiences you’d expect me to be undergoing based on my behavior and those I judge myself to be undergoing, that’s at least some evidence that I’m a reliable judge of my experiences. One challenge here is justifying the assumptions about what sorts of behavior are correlated with what experiences—assumptions that, in these cases, we are supposed trust over the judgments of a rational, focused person who is undergoing the experiences.
- Reliability about other things: Suppose that I am a reliable judge of truth in mathematics, chemistry, history, and philosophy. That’s some evidence evidence that I am a reliable judge in general, and also (very indirect) evidence that I am reliable judge of my experiences in particular. Cf. Sinhababu’s ‘The reliable route from nonmoral evidence to moral conclusions’ (2022).
↩︎
Parsimony arguably counts in favour of (F) over (M), since (F) is simpler and arguably less ad hoc than (M). But (F) and (M) aside, parsimony is a general point in favour of functionalism over non-functionalist theories of consciousness. So if parsimony is what’s doing in the work in supporting (F), you might as well just use parsimony to argue for functionalism directly instead of making the fading qualia argument. ↩︎
Possible exception: the experiences of the person who is having the parts of their brain replaced with silicon could maybe count as empirical evidence in favour of (F) over (M), though no one else would have access to this evidence. And even the subject of the experiment won’t be able to retain any knowledge of this evidence after the experiment is done, since their end judgments will be the same no matter what they ended up experiencing. ↩︎
Which we might be able to do in response to the evil demon hypothesis, which is much less parsimonious than the hypothesis that the external world exists. ↩︎
Also, note that if it were the case that 99% of material support consciousness, then functionalism would be nearly extensionally correct even if it were false. So the practical consequences of the view appealed to by this strategy for avoiding skepticism are close to the practical consequences of functionalism itself. For example, both have the consequence that intelligent AIs are at least probably conscious. ↩︎
One exception: we don’t need to rely on knowledge of our own experiences when developing an illusionist theory of consciousness. In fact, illusionists about consciousness might claim that skepticism about our experiences gives us reason to accept illusionism about consciousness. But the practical argument for (F) works if we’re trying to develop a theory of consciousness that doesn’t deny its existence, which is what most people studying consciousness are trying to do. ↩︎
A complication is that if we are completely ignorant of our experiences, then we are also ignorant of whether they are good or bad. This arguably lowers the stakes of any decision that potentially affects our experiences. For example, if I don’t know whether I’m having good experiences, then I don’t know whether I would lose anything of value if I were to lose consciousness from a failed attempt to upload my mind to a computer. Note, however, that this skepticism of the goodness or badness of our experiences follows only if we have complete ignorance of our experiences, and not ignorance merely of, say, their intensity or their history over time. ↩︎

Notes on arguments

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Reading

Jim Pryor’s ‘What Is an Argument?'
Jim Pryor’s ‘Vocabulary Describing Arguments’
Ted Sider’s notes on argument extraction
- This is a paper assignment from one of his intro courses, but it includes an excellent explanation of argument extraction. Ignore the assignment itself. Start reading at the bold “Extracting” on page 1.

Numbered-premise arguments

Here’s an argument presented in numbered-premise form:

If you legally voted in the previous U.S. presidential election, then you are a U.S. citizen.
My cat is not a U.S. citizen.
Therefore, my cat did not legally vote in the previous U.S. presidential election.

(1) and (2) are the premises. (3) is the conclusion. Listing out the premises and conclusion of an argument makes the argument easier to think and talk about.

Argument extraction

Usually the arguments that we study in this course are not presented in numbered-premise from by their authors. To extract the argument from a prose text is to turn it into numbered-premise form.

For example, here’s an argument from the Gorgias that we’ll consider in a later class:

I believe that nature itself reveals that it’s a just thing for the better man and the more capable man to have a greater share than the worse man and the less capable man. Nature shows that this is so in many places; both among the other animals and in whole cities and races of men, it shows that this is what justice has been decided to be: that the superior rule the inferior and have a greater share than they…I believe that these men do these things in accordance with the nature of what’s just—yes, by Zeus, in accordance with the law of nature, and presumably not with the one we institute. (483c-e)

Here’s one way to extract the argument from this passage:

It is natural for the strong to get a greater share than the weak.
Everything natural is just.
Therefore, it is just for the strong to get a greater share than the weak.

See how much easier this is to think about than the original wall of text?

Note that (2) isn’t explicitly stated in the passage, but I’ve included it because it’s being tacitly assumed and is needed to support the conclusion.

Argument evaluation

When evaluating an argument, ask yourself:

Do the argument’s premises support its conclusion?
Are the argument’s premises true?

One way for an argument’s premises to support its conclusion is for them to entail its conclusion. This means that it’s impossible for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true. In this case, we say that the argument is valid:

Validity: An argument is valid if and only if its premises entail its conclusion.¹

Whether an argument is valid depends only on its logical structure. Valid arguments can have false premises, and false conclusions. But if all of a valid argument’s premises are true, then we say that the argument is sound:

Soundness: An argument is sound if and only if: (1) it is valid and (2) all of its premises are true.

It follows from these definitions that if an argument is sound, then its conclusion must be true. So if you deny an argument’s conclusion, then you must deny that it is sound. In other words, you must either claim that its premises don’t entail its conclusion or that not all of its premises are true.

Argument repair

Even if an argument is unsound, there might be a way to revise it to make it sound. For example, consider this argument:

There is a law against cheating on your taxes.
It is always wrong to break the law.
Therefore, cheating on your taxes wrong.

(2) is false because it’s not wrong to break unjust laws. Nonetheless, there’s a straightforward way to repair the argument:

There is a just law against cheating on your taxes.
It is always wrong to break just laws.
Therefore, cheating on your taxes is wrong.

(The tradeoff to this revision is that it makes (1) more controversial.)

Your evaluation of an argument should include an attempt to repair it if you think it is unsound.

Deductive vs. inductive arguments

Although one way for the premises of an argument to support its conclusion is for them to entail it, that’s not the only way. For example, consider this argument:

It has not snowed in Toronto in July in the past 50 years.
Therefore, it will not snow in Toronto next July.

(1) doesn’t entail (2), because it’s possible for it to snow in Toronto next July, no matter what the weather in the past has been. Nonetheless, (1) still gives you good reason to accept (2).

An argument like this one, whose premises are supposed to support but not entail its conclusion, is inductive.² An argument whose premises are supposed to entail its conclusion is deductive. Most of the arguments that we’ll consider in this course are deductive.

Exercises

Classify each of the following arguments as valid or invalid:
- Argument 1:
  1. Grass is green.
  2. Therefore, grass is green.
- Argument 2:
  1. All men are mortal.
  2. Socrates is a man.
  3. Grass is green.
  4. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
- Argument 3:
  1. If you jump out of a two story building, then you will break your legs.
  2. Therefore, if you jump out of a two story building, then you will feel pain.
Come up with a valid argument for the conclusion that Toronto is the capital of Monaco.
Extract the argument from the following passage:

Some people fail to vote because they think one vote won’t make a difference. But what if everyone thought that way? It’d be terrible, since our democracy would collapse.

Solutions

1. Valid. Necessarily, if grass is green (and the premise is true), then grass is green (and the conclusion is true). But this is still a bad argument, since it is question-begging. Note that this argument is also sound, since grass is green.
2. Valid. (3) does no work and should be omitted. Nonetheless, it’s true that, necessarily, if all the premises are true, then the conclusion is true.
3. Invalid. It is possible for the conclusion to be false even if the premise is true. For example, you might be on heavy painkillers when you jump out of the building. However, we can make the argument valid if we add a premise to it:
  1. If you jump out of a two story building, then you will break your legs.
  2. If you break your legs, then you will feel pain.
  3. Therefore, if you jump out of a two story building, then you will feel pain.
There are infinitely many correct responses. Following argument 1 from the previous exercise, you could just say:
1. Toronto is the capital of Monaco.
2. Therefore, Toronto is the capital of Monaco.
If you want a more interesting valid argument, you could say:
1. Toronto is identical to Beijing.
2. Beijing is the capital of Monaco.
3. Therefore, Toronto is the capital of Monaco.
This highlights that the mere existence of a valid argument for a given claim does nothing whatsoever to support the claim. There is a valid argument for every claim.
The tacit conclusion of the argument in the passage is that no one should fail to vote. Here’s a first try to extract the argument for this conclusion:
1. Terrible consequences would follow from everyone failing to vote.
2. Therefore, no one should fail to vote.
The problem is that this argument is invalid: by itself, (1) doesn’t entail (2). But the proponent of the argument probably has an tacit premise in mind which would make the argument valid. Here’s one way to supply the tacit premise:
1. Terrible consequences would follow from everyone failing to vote.
2. If terrible consequences would follow from everyone doing something, then no one should do it.
3. Therefore, no one should fail to vote.
This extraction is better than the first one because it makes explicit an important premise that the argument tacitly relies on.³

Outside of philosophy, people usually mean that an argument is good if they call it ‘valid’, but that’s not how we’ll use the term. ↩︎
A further distinction can be made between two types of non-deductive arguments: (1) generalizations based on a sample (as in the weather example), and (2) inferences to the best explanation. Some people reserve the term ‘inductive’ for arguments of the first type, and call arguments of the second type ‘abductive’. ↩︎
These are cleaned up notes from a course I taught at Cornell in spring 2019. ↩︎

Highlights from A Journal of a Plague Year

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The book is a semi-fictionalized account of the 1665 plague in London, first published in 1722. The complete text is available on Project Gutenberg.

Social distancing

…if I met anybody in the street I would cross the way from them.

…whether it were in the street or in the fields, if we had seen anybody coming, it was a general method to walk away…

…coaches were dangerous things, and people did not care to venture into them, because they did not know who might have been carried in them last, and sick, infected people were…ordinarily carried in them to the pest-houses…

…I saw a poor man walking on the bank….At last I fell into some talk, at a distance, with this poor man…

…a vast number of people locked themselves up, so as not to come abroad into any company at all, nor suffer any that had been abroad in promiscuous company to come into their houses, or near them—at least not so near them as to be within the reach of their breath…

Lockdown

…all trade, except such as related to immediate subsistence, was, as it were, at a full stop.

…the greatest part of the poor or families who formerly lived by their labour, or by retail trade, lived now on charity…

…let any man consider what must be the miserable condition of this town if, on a sudden, they should be all turned out of employment, that labour should cease, and wages for work be no more.

This was the case with us at that time; and had not the sums of money contributed in charity by well-disposed people of every kind…been prodigiously great, it had not been in the power of the Lord Mayor and sheriffs to have kept the public peace.

Travel restrictions

…for some weeks that there was no getting at the Lord Mayor’s door without exceeding difficulty; there were such pressing and crowding there to get passes and certificates of health for such as travelled abroad, for without these there was no being admitted to pass through the towns upon the road, or to lodge in any inn.

…it was rumoured that an order of the Government was to be issued out to place turnpikes and barriers on the road to prevent people travelling, and that the towns on the road would not suffer people from London to pass for fear of bringing the infection along with them, though neither of these rumours had any foundation but in the imagination, especially at-first.

Forced quarantine

[From a City of London order]: “That to every infected house there be appointed two watchmen, one for every day, and the other for the night; and that these watchmen have a special care that no person go in or out of such infected houses whereof they have the charge, upon pain of severe punishment. And the said watchmen to do such further offices as the sick house shall need and require: and if the watchman be sent upon any business, to lock up the house and take the key with him; and the watchman by day to attend until ten of the clock at night, and the watchman by night until six in the morning.”

…several violences were committed and injuries offered to the men who were set to watch the houses so shut up; also several people broke out by force in many places…

Many…escapes were made out of infected houses, as particularly when the watchman was sent of some errand; for it was his business to go of any errand that the family sent him of; that is to say, for necessaries, such as food and physic; to fetch physicians, if they would come, or surgeons, or nurses, or to order the dead-cart, and the like; but with this condition, too, that when he went he was to lock up the outer door of the house and take the key away with him. To evade this…people got two or three keys made to their locks, or they found ways to unscrew the locks…and while they sent away the watchman to the market, to the bakehouse, or for one trifle or another, open the door and go out as often as they pleased. But this being found out, the officers afterwards had orders to padlock up the doors on the outside, and place bolts on them as they thought fit.

…there was not less than eighteen or twenty [watchmen] killed, or so wounded as to be taken up for dead, which was supposed to be done by the people in the infected houses which were shut up, and where they attempted to come out and were opposed.

Nor, indeed, could less be expected, for here were so many prisons in the town as there were houses shut up; and as the people shut up or imprisoned so were guilty of no crime, only shut up because miserable, it was really the more intolerable to them.

…they blew up a watchman with gunpowder, and burned the poor fellow dreadfully…

…it was said there was at one time ten thousand houses shut up…

Baking

…as I had convenience both for brewing and baking, I went and bought two sacks of meal, and for several weeks, having an oven, we baked all our own bread…

Drinking

Neither did I do what I know some did: keep the spirits always high and hot with cordials and wine and such things; and which…one learned physician used himself so much to as that he could not leave them off when the infection was quite gone, and so became a sot for all his life after.

Aversion to cash

…the butcher would not touch the money, but have it put into a pot full of vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The buyer carried always small money to make up any odd sum, that they might take no change.

The end

…the very first weeks’ bill [counting plague deaths] decreased 1,843; a vast number indeed!

It is impossible to express the change that appeared in the very countenances of the people that Thursday morning when the weekly bill came out…They shook one another by the hands in the streets, who would hardly go on the same side of the way with one another before. Where the streets were not too broad they would open their windows and call from one house to another, and ask how they did, and if they had heard the good news that the plague was abated. Some would return, when they said good news, and ask, ‘What good news?’ and when they answered that the plague was abated and the bills decreased almost two thousand, they would cry out, ‘God be praised!’ and would weep aloud for joy, telling them they had heard nothing of it; and such was the joy of the people that it was, as it were, life to them from the grave.

And yet after all, though the poor came to town very precipitantly…the rich made no such haste. The men of business, indeed, came up, but many of them did not bring their families to town till the spring came on, and that they saw reason to depend upon it that the plague would not return.

The Court, indeed, came up soon after Christmas, but the nobility and gentry, except such as depended upon and had employment under the administration, did not come so soon.

Beneficiary preferences and cause prioritization

Sat, 12 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

When assessing interventions, GiveWell assigns “moral weights” to outcomes such as averting the death of a child or doubling the consumption of someone in extreme poverty. Moral weights represent the relative goodness of outcomes. So if you assign 1 to averting the death of a child and 0.1 to doubling the consumption of someone in extreme poverty, then you are treating averting the death as ten times as good as the consumption doubling.

These moral weights can make a big difference. If you assign a relatively high value to doubling someone’s consumption, then you might conclude that GiveDirectly is more cost effective than the Against Malaria Foundation. If you assign a relatively high value to averting a death, then you might conclude the opposite.

Coming up with moral weights is hard, so GiveWell funded a study into the preferences of those who could be affected by some of their top-ranked interventions.¹ The idea seems to be that if those affected by an intervention would assign a particular weight to, say, averting the death of a child, then then we should assign that same weight to averting the death of a child when assessing the intervention. Or maybe the moral weights we use should at least be influenced in part by the moral weights that would be chosen by the potential beneficiaries.

But it’s unclear what exactly this amounts to or what its justification is. So in this post I’ll consider three ways in which you might let your moral weights be guided by beneficiary preferences, what if anything could justify each approach to moral weights, and what some challenges to each approach are. At the end, I’ll briefly consider how you could take beneficiary preferences into account even if they don’t affect the moral weights you use.

Approaches to moral weights

Person-relative

On the person-relative approach, you use different moral weights when assessing an intervention’s impact on each person depending on that person’s preferences. So if there is an intervention that affects both me and you, someone taking this approach would use the moral weights that match my preferences when assessing its impact on me, and use the (possibly different) moral weights that match your preferences when assessing its impact on you.

I do think there is something intuitive about this approach. The core idea seems to be that your preferences determine the impact that things have on your well-being, so if you want to maximize someone’s well-being then you should try to maximize their preference-satisfaction. But I think there are a few issues with this approach.

The first issue is just a limitation: many of those affected by interventions lack any relevant preferences. For example, one question GiveWell wanted to answer was how much to value averting the death of a child under the age of five to averting the death of an adult. But the researchers, understandably, never interviewed children under the age of five to figure out what their preferences are, since they aren’t sophisticated enough to have any relevant preferences.

The researchers did look at the preferences of adults in the children’s community about saving children compared to saving adults. But if you adjust the moral weights of outcomes that affect one person as a result of someone else’s preferences, you aren’t taking the person-relative approach. Instead, you’re probably taking the community-relative approach or the same-for-all approach, which I consider in the next two subsections.

The other two issues with this approach have to do with the motivation for it that I presented above. I think the core claim is not true generally, and even if it were true it wouldn’t fully support this approach.

First, it’s not true in general that someone’s well-being will be maximized by satisfying their current preferences. For example, suppose that I discount my future at a high rate and would prefer a small benefit now to a massive benefit later. Despite that preference, I’d be better off with the massive benefit later. Or suppose that I have an irrational fear of death and would prefer even a second of extended life to any increase in happiness. Despite that preference, I’d be better off having my happiness significantly increased.²

Second, even if your preferences at a time completely determine the impact that things at that time have on your well-being, it doesn’t follow that your preferences determine how important your well-being is compared to other things, such as the length of your life. But this is one of the questions that GiveWell wanted to answer.³ Of course, you might think that your preferences determine both, but it’s worth flagging that to defend this claim it’s not enough to defend the more familiar claim that your preferences at a time determine the impact that things at that time have on your well-being.

Community-relative

On the community-relative approach, you use different moral weights when assessing an intervention’s impact on each community depending on that community’s preferences. Those in the community might have conflicting preferences, so you’ll need to have some way of averaging them.

The community-relative approach avoids one limitation of the person-relative approach. Even if some people in the community, such as young children, lack any relevant preferences, this approach still offers guidance on what moral weights to assign to outcomes that affect them. But I think there’s not much to be said for it beyond that. I see two main issues with it.

First, unlike with the person-relative approach, it just seems counterintuitive on its face. Why would the preferences of people in a child’s community, who the child might be completely ignorant of, determine how bad it is for the child to die? That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. My preferences can affect the value of things for me, but I don’t see how they could affect the value of things for you, especially if you have no clue that I exist and don’t care about what I think.

Second, it is not obvious how to average people’s preferences when some people have fanatical views. For example, many people studied claimed that averting even a single death was preferable to any number of cash transfers. So if you naively average these people’s preferences, then you’ll end up assigning an infinite value to averting a death and a finite value to increasing someone’s consumption. This is true if there is even a single person in the community who has a fanatical view.⁴

There are a few ways you could to try to deal with the problem of fanaticism. First, you could take the median preference instead of the mean preference. This might help in the above case, but it won’t work in every case. There is no median of infinity and negative infinity, so if people are fanatical at both extremes, with no one in between, then the median will be undefined. Also, if a majority are fanatical, then even the median preference might still be infinite. But if only 51% have fanatical views, we might not want our moral weights to be determined entirely by the fanatics.

Second, you could put a cap on extreme views. For example, in the case of averting a death versus cash transfers, you could pretend that no one prefers averting a death to, say, $10,000,000 in cash transfers. But it’s not obvious how to justify drawing the line at one point as opposed to another. If you thought that there was an objective fact about the correct moral weights and that you knew it, then you could use that knowledge to help you draw the line. But if you already have this knowledge, why bother asking people what their preferences are in the first place? It’s also not obvious that there always should be a cap on extreme views. Maybe the fanatics are right about some things.

Third, you could look at people’s revealed preferences instead of their stated preferences, and hope that those who state fanatical views don’t actually act fanatically. But although there may be few people who act fanatically, it’s not obvious that there are none. And even if the move to revealed preferences deals with the problem of fanaticism, it may introduce other problems. For example, if you were to ask me I would claim that my far future matters just as much as my near future, but I probably don’t act perfectly like it does. But I wouldn’t want someone to discount my far future as a result of this revealed preference.

Same-for-all

On the same-for-all approach, you use the same moral weights when assessing every intervention, regardless of the preferences of those affected by it. Nonetheless, when coming up with the universal set of moral weights that you will use, you might take into account people’s preferences. This seems to be the approach that GiveWell plans to take:

In the future, we expect to have a single set of moral weights and that choosing this set will involve determining what moral weights would be implied by a variety of approaches or worldviews and then taking a weighted average of those views.

To the extent to which this approach involves averaging people’s preferences, it faces the problem of fanaticism that I discussed in the previous subsection.

If you take this approach, it’s unclear what justifies taking into account people’s preferences. One possibility is that you think that there is an objective fact about the correct moral weights to use and that people’s preferences are evidence of what the correct moral weights are.

Another possibility is that you think there are no objectively correct moral weights, but that we should (maybe because of this?) use the moral weights that best fit the preferences of everyone in the world. But if you are going to be a relativist about moral weights, it’s unclear why you would say that they are relative to humanity as a whole as opposed to relative to each person or each community, which on the face of it seem like more plausible forms of relativism.

For its part, GiveWell’s motivation for supporting the beneficiary preferences study seems in part to be that they were already taking into account people’s preferences when setting their moral weights—it was just the preferences of those in higher-income countries, where most of this sort of research had been done before. Given this, I see how it makes sense for them to make sure that they aren’t ignoring the preferences of the very people who are affected by the interventions that they assess. But there’s still the deeper question of whether we should be looking at anyone’s preferences in the first place to determine moral weights.

Weighting preferences beyond impact

So far I’ve been considering how beneficiary preferences could affect your moral weights, which represent the relative value of various outcomes. But even if you don’t think that beneficiary preferences should affect your moral weights, you might think that we should take beneficiary preferences into account when prioritizing interventions for some other reason. Maybe outcomes aren’t the only thing that matters. For example, you might think that we should respect people’s autonomy, even if doing so will lead to somewhat worse outcomes.

If you want to do this, one obvious challenge is how to balance respect for people’s autonomy (or whatever) with the expected value of outcomes.

A different challenge, specifically for trying to favour interventions that respect autonomy, is that it’s not always obvious which intervention best respects a community’s autonomy. For example, suppose that most people in a community strongly prefer interventions that avert deaths to interventions that distribute cash. Would their autonomy be best respected by distributing bed nets (which will avert many deaths, which they want) or by distributing cash (which they can do whatever they want with)?

Conclusion

I’ve considered three approaches to moral weights and how each might be informed by beneficiary preferences. I’ve focused on challenges that each approach faces. But to be clear, I have taken no stand on whether we should or should not take beneficiary preferences into account when setting our moral weights, or whether beneficiary preferences should be taken into account in some other way. Maybe the challenges can be overcome.

What if the challenges can’t be overcome and we shouldn’t take beneficiary preferences into account when setting our moral weights? How should we come up with our moral weights, then? Unfortunately, I don’t have anything more helpful to say than “do philosophy”. But as GiveWell points out, “philosophers have not done much work to consider how best to assign quantitative value to different kinds of outcomes”. So I think this is an important and neglected topic, and I hope that more people work on it in the future.

I will follow the study’s authors in talking in terms of preferences, but I think ‘values’ or ‘moral beliefs’ would be probably more accurate terms. ↩︎
GiveWell also flags this as a possible concern: “Preferences may not maximize well-being: Even if people perfectly understood the probability and information components of trading off income and mortality risk, they might not be able to reliably anticipate what would maximize their well-being, all things considered.” ↩︎
To be precise, here’s how GiveWell frames an example of the sort of question that they wanted to answer: “how much should we value averting the death of a one-year-old relative to doubling the income of an extremely poor household?” But the general question, as I see it, is how much to value extending a life (for example, the life of a one-year-old) compared to increasing someone’s well-being (for example, by increasing their income). ↩︎
This problem is similar in some ways to the fanaticism problem for some approaches to dealing with moral uncertainty. See MacAskill, Bykvist, and Ord’s Moral Uncertainty (2020), chapter 6. ↩︎

Arguments for and against functionalism

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Functionalism about consciousness (just ‘functionalism’ for short) is the view that a system’s conscious experiences are determined entirely by its functional states.¹ If functionalism is true, then a complete computer simulation of my brain would be conscious, and would undergo exactly the same conscious experiences as me.

For functionalism

The argument from non-exceptionalism:² If functionalism is false, then there is something exceptional about the material that our brains happen to be made out of. But there probably isn’t anything exceptional about the material that our brains happen to be made out of.
- Foerster (2020), ‘Anthropic bias and the basis of consciousness’
- Schwitzgebel (2020), ‘The Copernican Principle of Consciousness’
The fading and dancing qualia augments: If functionalism is false, then it is possible for a “rational being that is suffering from no functional pathology to be systematically out of touch with its experiences”. But this isn’t possible.
- Chalmers (1995), ‘Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia’
- Chalmers (1996), The Conscious Mind, chapter 7
- Chalmers (2010), ‘The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis’, pp. 37-40
- Foerster (2021), ‘How strong is the fading qualia argument?'
- Mogensen (2024), ‘How to Resist the Fading Qualia Argument’
The optimistic induction: Functionalist theories are true of all our non-conscious mental states, so a functionalist theory is probably true of our conscious mental states too.
The argument from simplicity: Functionalism is simpler than every plausible non-functionalist theory, but it accounts for the data about consciousness at least as well as non-functionalist theories do.
- Chalmers (1996), The Conscious Mind, pp. 242-6
The argument from functionalism about phenomenal judgments: A system’s judgments about its phenomenal states are determined entirely by its functional states, so its phenomenal states themselves are probably also determined entirely by its functional states.
- Shoemaker (1975), ‘Functionalism and Qualia’, pp. 295-9
- Chalmers (1996), The Conscious Mind, pp. 288-92
The argument from conceptual analysis: Functionalism is a conceptual truth.
- Lewis (1966), ‘An Argument for Identity Theory’, section III
- Lewis (1971), ‘Psychophysical and Theoretical Identifications’
- Armstrong (1968), A Materialist Theory Of Mind, pp. 82-5

Against functionalism

The argument from liberalism—
- Counterfactual version: If functionalism is true, then things like an appropriately organized sequence of water pipes or country would be conscious. But these things would not be conscious, no matter how they are organized.
  - Block (1978), ‘Troubles With Functionalism’, section 1.2
  - Searle (1980), ‘Minds, Brains and Programs’, p. 423
- Actual world version: If functionalism is true, then things like countries and economies actually are conscious. But these things are not conscious.
  - Schwitzgebel (2014), ‘If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious’
    - Framed as a discussion of materialism, but I think better read as a discussion of functionalism. Also, not framed as an objection to materialism, since Schwitzgebel takes no stand on whether the United States is conscious.
- Triviality version: If functionalism is true, then nearly everything is conscious. But most things are not conscious.
  - Putnam (1988), Representation and Reality, pp. 120-5
  - Searle (1990), ‘Is the brain a digital computer?', section IV
  - Chalmers (1996), ‘Does a Rock Implement Every Finite-State Automaton?'
    - Response to Putnam and Searle
  - Godfrey-Smith (2007), ‘Triviality arguments against functionalism’
  - Piccinini (2017) , ‘Computation in Physical Systems’, section 3
The pessimistic induction: Functionalist theories are false of the vast majority of things, so a functionalist theory is probably false of consciousness too.
- Searle (1980), ‘Minds, Brains and Programs’, p. 423
The argument from the intrinsic nature of consciousness: If functionalism is true, then consciousness is a relational property. But consciousness is an intrinsic property.³
- Kim (2005), Physicalism, or Something Near Enough, p. 173
- Van Gluck (2007), ‘Functionalism and Qualia’, pp. 393-4
- Mørch (2019), ‘Is Consciousness Intrinsic?: A Problem for the Integrated Information Theory’
  - Focused on IIT specifically and not functionalism more broadly.

Methodological notes

It might seem puzzling how it’s even possible to argue about the truth of functionalism. On the one hand, it seems like functionalism—a theory of consciousness—is the sort of thing that we could learn only by making observations, and so it isn’t a priori. On the other hand, it seems like we’d make exactly the observations whether or not functionalism is true, and so it isn’t a posteriori.⁴ But we just saw nine arguments for or against functionalism. What’s going on?

Some of the arguments rely on general theoretical principles. The argument from non-exceptionality appeals to the Self-Sampling Assumption or a version of the Copernican Principle, and the argument from simplicity appeals to the principle of parsimony. General theoretical principles like these often give us reason to accept one of many observationally equivalent theories. For example, the principle of parsimony arguably counts against dualism in favor of physicalism, even if dualism and physicalism are observationally equivalent.

The two arguments from induction rely on, well, induction—either from other theories of mind (the optimistic intuition) or other theories more generally (the pessimistic induction).

One of the arguments (the argument from conceptual analysis) entails that, despite what you might have thought, it is a priori that functionalism is true.

The rest of the arguments rely on various assumptions about consciousness. The argument from liberalism relies on assumptions about what sort of things could be conscious. These assumptions are supposed to be pre-theoretically obvious or “intuitive”, though it’s unclear whether they are supposed to be knowable a priori or a posteriori.

The argument from the intrinsic nature of consciousness assumes that consciousness is an intrinsic property. Maybe this is supposed to be knowable by conceptual analysis or introspection. Note that if introspection counts as observation, then functionalism and non-functionalism are arguably not observationally equivalent.

The two remaining arguments (the fading and dancing qualia augments, and the argument from functionalism about phenomenal judgments) rely on assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and cognition. As before, it is unclear whether these assumptions are supposed be a knowable priori or a posteriori.

I understand ‘determination’ broadly to include causal determination in addition to constitution or grounding. Given this, dualists who believe that there is a law of nature connecting a system’s functional states to its (in their view, non-physical) conscious experiences count as functionalists in this sense. So I don’t consider any arguments for or against dualism here. ↩︎
Most of these names are made up by me, so you probably won’t have luck searching for the arguments by them. The two exceptions are ‘the argument from liberalism’ and ‘the dancing and fading qualia arguments’. ↩︎
Given how I’ve characterized functionalism, this argument arguably succeeds only if physicalism is true. If physicalism is false, then certain functional states might reliably bring about non-physical states of consciousness which are intrinsic, even if the functional states themselves are relational. This would be enough to make functionalism true. ↩︎
I’ve sometimes heard it suggested that if, as an experiment, we simulated someone’s brain and asked the simulation whether it’s conscious, an affirmative answer would be empirical evidence for functionalism. But of course we would expect to get this answer even if functionalism is false. If we didn’t get this answer, it would just mean that we didn’t simulate the brain correctly. ↩︎

Experiencing time, and pain

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Two uncontroversial claims: First, time sometimes seems to pass more slowly than normal, and sometimes seems to pass more quickly than normal. So what is in fact an interval of, say, five minutes sometimes seems longer or shorter than another interval of five minutes. Second, it’s better when a pain lasts for a shorter duration than a longer duration, all else equal.

But what is relevant to the badness of a given pain—its actual duration, or its subjective duration? For example, compare (1) and (2), where p is a pain and r is a rate:

Experiencing p for 5 minutes while time subjectively passes at r.
Experiencing p for 10 minutes while time subjectively passes at 2r.

Is (1) less bad than (2), because the pain lasts for a shorter amount of time, or are they equally bad, because in both cases the pain seems to last for the same amount of time?

Call those who give the first answer ‘objectivists’, and those who give the second answer ‘subjectivists’. Of course, you could ask a corresponding question about pleasure. In general, objectivists think that the intrinsic value of an experience is proportional to its actual duration, and subjectivists think that the intrinsic value of an experience is proportional to its subjective duration.

In this post I’ll first say why it matters whether objectivism or subjectivism is true, and then explain why I accept subjectivism.

Why it matters which view is true

Pessimism: Subjectivism lends support to pessimism. Which times seem to last the longest? Those that are the most agonizing. Which times seem to last the shortest? Those that are the most enjoyable. Now suppose that subjectivism is true. Then the long-seeming pains are bad in proportion to their subjective duration, which is much longer than their objective duration. Similarly, the short-seeming pleasures are good in proportion to their subjective duration, which is much shorter than their objective duration. So the badness of everything bad that we experience is magnified, and the goodness of everything good that we experience is diminished.

Animal ethics: It’s plausible that different species experience time at different rates. Suppose, say, that cows experience time at twice the rate of chickens. And suppose that subjectivism is true. Then all else equal, it’s better for a cow to experience a given pain for five minutes than for a chicken to experience the same pain for five minutes, since the pain will seem to last twice as long to the chicken. This effect might be even greater between other animals. For example, maybe turtles experience time at a thousand times the rate of humming birds.

AI ethics: We may be able to create conscious AI systems that experience time at rates very different from us. All the considerations from animal ethics apply here, where the AI systems can be thought of as species of animals. Beyond this, if the AI systems are moral agents and it is appropriate to punish them for wrongdoing, then subjectivism and objectivism may entail that different lengths of punishment are just.¹ This could make the difference between a sentence that lasts for seconds and a sentence that lasts for years.

Human enhancement: Suppose that subjectivism is true. Then doubling the rate at which time seems to pass while someone is experiencing a pain is as good as halving the actual duration of the pain. Similarly, halving the rate at which time seems to pass while someone is experiencing a pleasure is as good as doubling the actual duration of the pleasure. In the future we may have the ability to alter the rates at which time seems to pass to us without otherwise affecting the quality of our experiences. If subjectivism is true, then we can use this ability to increase the value of our pleasures and decrease the disvalue of our pains. But if objectivism is true, then there would be no benefit to decreasing the subjective duration of a pain or increasing the subjective duration of a pleasure.

Utilitarianism: In his foundational text on utilitarianism, Bentham says that “the value of a pleasure or pain…will be greater or less according to…its duration” (in addition to its “intensity”, “certainty or uncertainty”, and “propinquity or remoteness”).² But he doesn’t say whether this is its actual duration or its subjective duration. This makes a big difference, partly for the reasons given above. So utilitarians should be especially concerned with whether objectivism or subjectivism is true.

An argument for subjectivism

There’s a simple argument for subjectivism. It relies on the following principle:

If what it’s like to experience e1 is exactly the same as what it’s like to experience e2, then the intrinsic value of e1 equals the intrinsic value of e2.

The idea behind the principle is that the intrinsic value of an experience depends solely on what it’s like to experience it. So the intrinsic badness of a pain depends solely what it’s like to experience the pain, and the intrinsic goodness of a pleasure depends solely on what it’s like to experience the pleasure.

Now think back to (1) and (2) from above. What it’s like to experience the pain for 5 minutes while time subjectively passes at r is exactly the same as what it’s like to experience the pain for 10 minutes while time subjectively passes at 2r. (This follows from what it means for time to subjectively pass at a given rate.) So by the above principle, the pains have the same intrinsic value, which is what subjectivists claim.

An argument for objectivism

Despite the argument for subjectivism, I still have a lingering feeling that there is something worse about the objectively longer pain. I think this feeling is ultimately motivated by the following misguided argument for objectivism.

The basic idea behind the argument is that talk about the objective duration of an experience is interchangeable with talk about its quantity. How? Well, instead of saying that I experienced one pain that lasted for five minutes, we can say that I experienced five pains successively, each of which lasted for one minute. Or that I experienced three hundred pains successively, each of which lasted for one second. And so on, until we get to some arbitrarily small unit. This might be an odd way of talking, but it’s not incorrect.

If we talk this way, then what we previously would have described as an objectively longer pain we now describe simply as more pain. But it’s uncontroversial that more pain is worse than less pain. So the 10 minutes of pain is more pain than the 5 minutes of pain, since there’s (objectively) more of it, which in turn makes it worse. And this is what objectivists claim.

The problem with the argument is that “more pain is worse than less pain” is true only if all else is equal. But in the relevant cases (for example, 5 minutes of pain at r vs. 10 minutes of pain at 2r) not all else is equal: the the subjective rate of the passage of time is different while each pain is being experienced. And whether this affects the value of the pains is precisely what is in question in the debate between subjectivists and objectivists.

As suggested by Bostom and Yudkowsky in ‘The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence’ (2014). ↩︎
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781), chapter IV, section II. ↩︎

The evolution of pain

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In one of my favorite passages from Catch-22, Yossarian asks why God made us capable of feeling pain:

“Why in the world did He ever create pain?”

“Pain?” Lieutenant Shiesskopf’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.”

“And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded. “Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead?”

“People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes right in the middle of their foreheads.”

“They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony, don’t they?”

In asking his question, Yossarian is posing a challenge to theists. But theism aside, there’s a corresponding question you can ask about evolution. Why did we evolve to feel pain?

A first try is to give the answer suggested by Lieutenant Shiesskopf’s wife: pain conveys useful information, such as information about bodily damage. But, as Yossarian points out, there are other ways that this information could have been conveyed. It didn’t need to be conveyed though pain. After all, the vast majority of the information that we get about the world is conveyed through our senses in a way that doesn’t involve us feeling pain.

Another try, not considered in the above quote, is to point out that pain plays an important role in motivating us to act in ways that promote reproductive fitness. Merely knowing that your body is being damaged might not be enough to motivate you to avoid this damage. In contrast, the pain that goes along with this damage might be enough to motivate you to avoid it. To paraphrase Cowen and Tabarrok, pain is a signal wrapped up in an incentive.

But there are other ways that we could have been motivated to avoid bodily damage. For example, pleasure is an excellent motivator. Imagine a creature that feels only varying degrees of pleasure. This creature might feel mild pleasure when it breaks its legs, but strong pleasure when its legs are healthy. This would be enough to motivate it to avoid breaking its legs. Similarly, I’m motivated to choose chocolate ice cream over vanilla ice cream not because eating vanilla ice cream is painful, but because eating chocolate ice cream is more pleasurable than eating vanilla ice cream.

Of course, you could ask the same question about pleasure: why did we evolve to feel pleasure? Pleasure conveys information, but this information could have been conveyed in another way. And although pleasure motivates, so does pain. Imagine a creature that feels only varying degrees of pain. This creature might feel pain when it satisfies its hunger, but even stronger pain when it is hungry. This would be enough to motivate it to eat. Similarly, you’re motivated to have a root canal not because having one is pleasurable, but because not having one is more painful than having one.

In general, there are at least two ways to motivate a creature to do something. One way is to make doing it less painful than not doing it. Another way is to make doing it more pleasurable than not doing it.¹ This suggests that it is unsurprising that we would evolve to feel either pleasure or pain, since arguably one of them is necessary to motivate us,² but there is no obvious reason why we would need to feel both.

So although I’m considering the question, “Why did we evolve to feel pain?”, I could just as well have considered the question, “Why did we evolve to feel pleasure?”. And a better question is probably, “Why did we evolve to feel both pleasure and pain instead of just one or the other other?”.

For the question of why we evolved to feel pain to be interesting, it’s not enough for there to be some other way that we could have been built that would have made it unnecessary for us to feel pain. Even if Yossarian’s blue-and-red neon tubes would have done the job of pain well enough, there’s nothing puzzling about why we didn’t evolve to be like that. Among other reasons, working neon tubes couldn’t easily have come about by a slow step-by-step process, and neon and glass weren’t readily available in our environment. For short, I’ll say that the engineering challenge would have been too hard for evolution.

But the question of we why evolved to feel pain can’t be answered so easily, because it seems like there there are possible painless creatures that wouldn’t pose an especially hard engineering challenge for evolution. For example, it’s not obvious why building a creature that feels only varying degrees of pleasure would be harder than building a creature that feels both pleasure and pain. If anything, you might naively think that it’s easier to build the creature that feels only pleasure: instead of figuring out how to generate both pleasure and pain, you just need to figure out how to generate pleasure.

Here’s my speculative attempt at an answer. As the above examples suggest, a rational, net-pleasure-maximizing creature can be motivated just as well by pleasure alone, pain alone, or a mixture of both. But not all creatures are rational and net-pleasure-maximizing. And to appropriately motivate a creature that is not rational or not net-pleasure-maximizing—including, possibly, the sort of creature we were when we first evolved to feel pleasure and pain—you might need to make it capable of feeling both pleasure and pain.

I’ll preface my explanation of this answer by noting that pleasure and pain are immediately motivating, in the following sense: if you are feeling pain, that in itself gives you some motivation to get out of that state, and if you are feeling pleasure, that in itself gives you some motivation to stay in that state. This motivation need not rest on a cost-benefit analysis or a comparison between what you are actually feeling and would be feeling in other circumstances.

This was glossed over my above examples. These examples emphasized that prudent people might be motivated to stay in a painful state (if the alternative leads to more pain) or get out of a pleasurable state (if the alternative leads to more pleasure). But even these people must resist the more immediate motivation to stop feeling the pain or keep feeling the pleasure.

Why does it matter that pleasure and pain are immediately motivating? Let’s start with rationality. Consider an unsophisticated, non-rational creature that lacks the ability to assess and compare the outcomes of different actions. And suppose that it feels only varying degrees of pleasure—say, strong pleasure when its legs are healthy, compared to mild pleasure when its legs are broken. Even though protecting its legs is pleasure-maximizing, the creature isn’t smart enough to figure this out, and so it can’t be motivated on account of this to protect its legs.

Now suppose, in contrast, that this creature is capable of feeling both pleasure and pain, and that it feels pain when it breaks its legs. Because of how pain works, this in itself is sufficient motivation for the creature to get out of this state. It doesn’t matter that the creature is unable to compare how it feels when it has healthy legs to how it feels when it has broken legs. So pain, unlike pleasure, can motivate even a non-rational creature to get out of a given state.

That deals with the rationality part of my answer. I’ll now deal with the net-pleasure-maximizing part.

Consider a creature that is net-pleasure-satisficer instead of a net-pleasure-maximizer: it wants to ensure it feels enough pleasure, but it is largely indifferent to how much pleasure it feels above a certain threshold. If this creature were biologically guaranteed to feel at least a certain amount of pleasure, enough to put it above that threshold, then it might act with indifference to the future. In contrast, if it faced the threat of pain that would put it below the threshold, then it would be motivated to look out for its future. So pain, unlike pleasure, can motivate even an unambitious satisficer.³

OK, suppose this is right. The natural follow-up is to ask why evolution didn’t just make us painless creatures who are rational and net-pleasure-maximizing. But this arguably would have been too hard of an engineering challenge (see the previous section). Just focusing on the rationality part: evolution couldn’t create a rational creature right off the bat. It’s a slow, long process to get from a single-celled organism to a creature with the rationality of humans. But it was important for us to have the relevant motivation long before we got to this point. Otherwise we wouldn’t have made it so far.

Why does any of this matter? Well, for one, the fact that we evolved to feel pain is the ultimate source of all our suffering. So it would be nice to have a better understanding of it.

Another reason has to do with estimating the total amount of suffering in the universe. If it were just a fluke that we evolved to feel pain, then probably most creatures on other planets do not feel pain, and the universe as a whole probably contains significantly less suffering that we might think if we naively extrapolated from what we see on Earth.

Beyond that, thinking about why we evolved to feel pain helps clarify what, if anything, pain is necessary for. And this has practical consequences. For example, if pain were necessary to inform or motivate us, then it would arguably be a mistake to completely eliminate it (say, through genetic engineering). But if pain isn’t necessary to perform either of these functions, then we should be more open to pain abolitionism.⁴

If a toy model helps, think about a creature that always acts to maximize the net amount pleasure (pleasure minus pain) that it feels. When deciding between two actions, Φing and ψing, the creature will be concerned only with the difference between the net pleasure it will feel if it Φs and the net pleasure it will feel if it ψs. It makes no difference to its decision whether the net pleasure of either action is negative or positive. ↩︎
It’s actually not obvious why we would need to feel anything at all in order to function in the ways that we do. But that’s a whole other issue that I’m not concerned with in this post. Also, creatures as sophisticated as humans are clearly motivated by things apart from pleasure and pain. So to be more precise, I just mean to suggest that pain or pleasure was arguably necessary to motivate the sort of unsophisticated creatures that we were when we first evolved to feel pain, not that they are the only things that can or do motivate us now. ↩︎
At least, so long as the satisficer isn’t too unambitious. If they set the bar extremely low and are satisfied so long as they are experiencing less pain than, say, the worst pain imaginable, then they might not be motivated by even large amounts of pain that fall short of this extreme. ↩︎
Thanks to Kyle Ferguson for discussion of the ideas in this post. Although there is a lot of academic work related in some way to the evolution of pain, I was unable to find any academic work that addresses the specific question I’m concerned with in this post. There was a 2019 meeting of the Royal Society titled ‘Evolution of mechanisms and behaviour important for pain’, but the talks that came closest to addressing my question focused on edge-cases (such as chronic pain or pain during childbirth) instead of typical instances of pain. ↩︎

What I've been listening to lately

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The Goal - Leonard Cohen
Didn’t It Rain - Songs: Ohia
September 11, 2001 - Jason Molina, Will Oldham, and Alasdair Roberts
Dawn Chorus - Thom Yorke
How I Made My Millions - Radiohead
The Dead Flag Blues - Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Murder Most Foul - Bob Dylan
Odds Against Tomorrow - Bill Orcutt
God’s Song (That’s Why I Love Mankind) - Randy Newman
Via Chicago - Jeff Tweedy
Lua - Bright Eyes
Pony - Tom Waits
Hollywood - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Blue Chicago Moon - Songs: Ohia

The Anti-Mask League

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, which is about the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. One of the most interesting parts is about the use of surgical masks in San Francisco.

You could buy a mask from the Red Cross for around $1.75, or from a “gouger” for around $8.75, in 2020 dollars. Levi Straus, the jean manufacturer, helped produce masks.

At first there was merely social pressure to wear a mask. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

It will soon be impolite to acknowledge an introduction without a mask and the man who wears none will likely to become isolated, suspected and regarded as a slacker.¹

Then masking became compulsory. The law read, in part:

Every person appearing on the public streets, in any public place, or in any assemblage of persons or in any place where two or more persons are congregated…shall wear a mask or covering except when partaking of meals, over the nose and mouth…²

Compliance with this law was initially widespread, but it fell off once the pandemic appeared to be under control:

An increasing number of people slipped their masks down under their chins or didn’t wear them all. The police arrested hundreds whom the courts subjected to punishments ranging from a five-dollar fine to thirty days in jail…[One night] the police raided the lobbies of all the downtown hotels and arrested 400 mask-slackers, most of whom had slipped off their masks to sneak a quick smoke…³

Some doubted that masking laws could be enforced effectively. The mayor of Denver said, “Why, it would take half the population to make the other half wear masks."⁴

The masking law was rescinded when it looked like the pandemic was nearly over. Then the number of flu cases started to increase again.

The mayor of San Francisco tried asking people nicely to please go back to wearing masks:

The Board of Health feels it necessary to resume the wearing of masks and I, as Mayor of San Francisco, hereby respectfully ask you to do so immediately.⁵

Most people were unmoved. There was talk of re-instating the masking law. This prompted the opponents of masking to come out of the woodwork:

Specific opponents of masking included, as one might expect, the Christian Scientists. They had complied, albeit reluctantly, with the fall masking ordinance, but now opposed any revival of that regulation was “subversive of personal liberty and constitutional rights.” Civil libertarians…agreed: “If the Board of Health can force people to wear masks, then it can force them to submit to inoculation, or any experiment of indignity.”

What businessmen hoped would be the most profitable Christmas shopping season ever had just opened, and they opposed masking on the grounds that it would frighten and depress the public and diminish sales.⁶

Supervisor Nelson…pointed to the danger that enforcement of the mask ordnance would mean “the stilling of song in the throats of singers” and the arresting of musicians “as they blow their horns going down the street.” An octogenarian asserted that he would not wear a mask and defined the authorities to arrest him.⁷

Someone, apparently upset by the possibility of the re-instatement of the masking law, mailed a bomb to the mayor’s office.⁸

Despite the opposition, the masking law ended up being re-instated. Hundreds more were arrested for non-compliance.

Opponents of masking banded together to form the Anti-Mask League. Its first meeting went badly:

[It] ended in a shouting match between the moderates, who wanted to circulate a petition calling for an end to masking, and the extremists, who wanted to initiate recall proceedings against Hassler [the mayor]. Pandemonium reigned until someone announced, “I rented this hall and now I’m going to turn out the lights."⁹

It is unclear whether there were any other meetings of the League.¹⁰ But it was presumably short-lived: within weeks the masking law was rescinded for a second and final time, as the pandemic began to wind down for good.

p. 103. All references are to America’s Forgotten Pandemic. ↩︎
p. 102. ↩︎
p. 105. ↩︎
p. 112. ↩︎
p. 108. ↩︎
p. 109. ↩︎
pp. 111-2. ↩︎
p. 110. ↩︎
p. 112. ↩︎
Online information about it is sparse. University of Michigan’s Influenza Encyclopedia has images of two articles that mention the League, but their text is illegible. ↩︎

Anthropic bias and the basis of consciousness

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Functionalists think that every system that has the right functional organization is conscious.¹ For example, they think that an advanced computer that has the same functional organization as my brain would be conscious, even if the computer is made out of silicon instead of grey matter. Non-functionalists deny this. They think that in addition to having the right functional organization, a system must be made out of the right material (grey matter, or whatever) to be conscious.

I have what I used to think was a good argument for functionalism. Now I think the argument is mistaken, for reasons I’ll explain below.

The argument goes like this. Suppose that you pick a material at random, give it the functional organization of our brains, and find that it supports consciousness. That counts in favour the view that most or all materials support consciousness. (If only, say, 1% of materials supported consciousness, then there is only a 1% chance that you would have picked one that supports consciousness.) But we can think of ourselves as such a random sample. After all, there are many different materials our brains could have been made out of. Evolution doesn’t care which one our brains are made out of, so long as it gets the job done.

The problem with the argument is that it fails to take into account observation selection effects. However limited the range of consciousness-supporting materials is, every conscious observer will find that the material that they are made out of supports consciousness. If it didn’t support consciousness, then they wouldn’t be able to make any conscious observations. Given this, we are at best justified in thinking of ourselves as a random sample of the conscious systems that are functionally organized in the relevant way. And nothing interesting follows from the trivial fact that a random sample of these conscious systems is conscious.

To see this point more clearly, consider the following parody argument:

Suppose that you pick a planet at random and find that it is habitable. That counts in favour of the view that most or all planets are habitable. But we can think of Earth as such a random sample. So the fact that Earth is habitable counts in favour of the view that most or all planets are habitable.

This argument makes the same mistake as the above argument for functionalism. However limited the range habitable planets is, every observer will find that the planet they inhabit is habitable. If it wasn’t habitable, then they wouldn’t be able to observe themselves inhabiting it because they wouldn’t exist.²

Of course, this doesn’t mean that functionalism is false. I think that a different argument for it probably succeeds. But I am now a bit less sure of functionalism than I used to be, since some of my confidence came from thinking that the argument in this post succeeded.

Complications

Above I talked about conscious observers. But what about unconscious observers? Why can’t we think of ourselves as a random sample of all observers—both the conscious and the unconscious ones?

Flat-footed reply: Unconscious “observers” aren’t really observers.

A more interesting reply: We can, but even the unconscious observers wouldn’t find that they lack consciousness. For example, a computer that has the same functional organization as my brain would believe that it is conscious. If it didn’t believe this, then its functional organization would differ from the functional organization of my brain, since I believe that I am conscious. So every observer with the relevant functional organization will at least believe that they are conscious, even if they aren’t.

This is a very rough characterization of functionalism. For an explanation of what I mean by ‘functional organization’, see the first section of Chalmers' ‘Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia’ (1995). Sometimes the term ‘functionalism’ is used to refer to the much stronger view that mental states are identical to functional states. As I’m using the term ‘functionalism’ here, it refers to more modest view that there is a lawful correlation between mental states and functional states. ↩︎
This example is from chapter 1 of Bostrom’s Anthropic Bias (2002). ↩︎

Carbon offsetting ≠ moral offsetting

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Carbon offsetting is the practice of doing something that increases carbon emissions, and then “offsetting” those carbon emissions by doing something that decreases carbon emissions by an amount that equals or exceeds the increase. For example, you might take a flight, and then donate to a charity that works to reduce carbon emissions.

Moral offsetting is harder to explain, but it is in some ways analogous to carbon offsetting. For example, a meat eater might try to morally offset her consumption of meat by donating to an animal welfare charity. The donation is supposed to produce a benefit that equals or exceeds the harm caused by her meat eating.

Some people think that carbon offsetting is not just analogous to moral offsetting, but that it is an instance of moral offsetting. Some of these people also think that moral offsetting is wrong. If you combine these views, then you get a straightforward argument for the conclusion that carbon offsetting is wrong. Though I’ve never seen this argument presented so explicitly, I think that it underlies much of the opposition to carbon offsetting.¹

The problem with the argument is that carbon offsetting is not an instance of moral offsetting. To see this, think about how the donation to the animal welfare charity is supposed to offset your meat eating. It doesn’t prevent the animals you eat from being harmed. It just benefits some different animals. The same goes for all instances of moral offsetting: the offset action causes some harm, and the offsetting action produces some benefit that equals or exceeds that harm.

But this is not how carbon offsetting works. It’s not that the emissions from your flight cause some harm, and the carbon offset you buy produces some benefit. Instead, the carbon offset prevents the emissions from your flight from being harmful in the first place. After all, carbon emissions aren’t intrinsically harmful. They are harmful only to the extent to which they contribute to climate change. And if, as a result of buying carbon offsets, you are carbon neutral, then you have not contributed to climate change.

Here is what I now think is a better analogy for carbon offsetting. Suppose that there is a car whose breaks work poorly, and so is likely to harm people if it’s driven. Driving the car without fixing its breaks is wrong. But if you fix the car’s breaks, and thereby prevent this likely harm, then driving it is permissible. This is not because fixing the breaks produces some benefit that outweighs the harm of driving the car. It’s because fixing the breaks prevents driving the car from being harmful in the first place.

This is not a new point. MacAskill makes it clearly in Doing Good Better.² But a lot of people who read my ‘Moral Offsetting’ paper seem to think that I was saying that carbon offsetting is an instance of moral offsetting, or that I was working out the moral principles behind carbon offsetting.³ So I wanted to go on record as saying that’s not at all what I was doing, and that I wish I had been clearer about this in the paper.

This argument is implicit in comparisons of carbon offsets to child abuse offsets, offsets for cheating on your partner, and the sale of indulgences. ↩︎
See pp. 142-3. ↩︎
Many people on Twitter seem to have interpreted the paper in this way (1, 2, 3). ↩︎

The identity of indiscernible experiences

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Two people can, at the same time, have qualitatively identical experiences. For example, I experience a pain at a given time, and you experience a pain that feels exactly like my pain at the same time. The natural view is that in these cases, although our experiences are qualitatively identical, they are numerically distinct. So in the above case, there are two pains between us, not one.

In this post I’ll argue that if dualism or idealism is true, then this natural view is false.¹ If dualism or idealism is true, then there is only one pain between us in the above case. More generally, if dualism or idealism is true, then whenever two people, at the same time, have qualitatively identical experiences, then their experiences are numerically identical. I call this view ‘the identity of indiscernible experiences’ (IIE). Since I think IIE is false, I take this to be a reductio on dualism and idealism.

My argument relies on a weak version of the identity of indiscernibles. To get a sense of why the version I’ll rely on is plausibly modest, it will help to start with an implausibly strong version of the principle. This implausibly strong version says that no two things are qualitatively identical. There are well-known counterexamples to this principle. For example, there could be two qualitatively identical billiard balls that are, say, a meter apart from each other.

OK, but how is it possible for the balls to differ numerically despite being qualitatively identical? The obvious answer is that they differ in spatial location. If they were in the same spatial location, then it seems right to conclude that there is just one ball, not two. This suggests a weakened version of the identity of indiscernibles which avoids this sort of counterexample, namely: no two things are qualitatively identical at the same time, unless they differ in spatial location.

Now consider experiences. Suppose that two are, at the same time, qualitatively identical. Can we say the same thing about them that we said about the qualitatively identical billiard balls—that they differ numerically in virtue of having different spatial locations? Not if we’re dualists or idealists, who don’t think that experiences have spatial locations.² So, given dualism or idealism, even the weak version of the identity of indiscernibles is enough to entail that the experiences are numerically identical.

We can formalize this argument as follows:

Non-locality of Experiences: No experience is located in space.
Weak Identity of Indiscernibles: For all x and y, if x and y are qualitatively identical at the same time and do not differ in spatial location, then x = y.
Therefore, IIE: For all experiences x and y, if x and y are qualitatively identical at the same time, then x = y.

The argument is valid. Dualists and idealists are committed to (1), and (2) seems plausibly modest. Again, I’m not endorsing this argument. I’m just saying that if dualism or idealism is true, then it is sound.

Objections and replies

Objection: You claim that dualists and idealists are committed to (1), but I’ve never heard a dualist or idealist endorse it. I’m pretty sure that even they would agree that there can be a pain in, say, your foot. And that’s inconsistent with (1).

Reply: Not really. When we say that there is a pain in your foot, we mean that you are experiencing a pain that represents a location in your foot. But that doesn’t mean that the pain itself is located in your foot, or anywhere else. Similarly, a map can represent Toronto without being located in Toronto. In fact, even physicalists should say this.³ If your foot pain is a brain state, then it is located in your head even though it represents a location in your foot.

Objection: Premise (2) is false. Two qualitatively identical experiences can differ in virtue of having different causal properties or histories, even if they don’t differ in spatial location. For example, my pain was caused by me stubbing my toe, while your pain was caused by you stubbing your toe. And my pain causes me to be cranky, while your pain causes your to be cranky.

Reply: Two things can’t differ simply in having different causal properties or histories. For example, suppose that one ball moved because you pushed it, while another ball moved because I pushed it. Or suppose that one ball broke your window, while another ball broke my window. The different causal histories of the balls are possible only because the balls weren’t always in the same place at the same time.

Objection: Premise (2) is false. Two qualitatively identical experiences can differ in virtue of having different owners, even if they don’t differ in spatial location. My pain is mine, your pain is yours.

Reply 1: Imagine someone saying the same thing about what are supposedly two qualitatively identical billiard balls that don’t differ in spatial location: “Despite appearances, there are two balls here. The difference between them is that one ball is mine and the other ball is yours.” That would be silly. Two things can’t differ simply in having different owners.

Reply 2: If you insist that two experiences can differ simply in having different owners, that this is a brute fact about them, then you are assuming non-reductionism about persons. This admittedly a popular view among dualists and idealists. So I need to qualify my position. It’s not that dualism or idealism alone entails IIE. It’s dualism or idealism together with reductionism about persons. So what I really have a reductio on is (dualism & reductionism) and (idealism & reductionism).

Objection: What’s so bad about IIE, anyway?

Reply 1: Compare the following worlds:

World 1: A million people are experiencing qualitatively identical extreme pains. It’s the worst pain imaginable.
World 2: One unlucky person is experiencing the extreme pain that the people in world 1 are experiencing. The other 999,999 people are experiencing barely-noticeable minor pains.

Which is worse? Obviously world 1. But if IIE is true, then world 2 is worse than world 1, since there’s more pain in it. After all, if IIE is true, then all of the qualitatively identical pains in world 1 are numerically identical. So it would be pointless to completely relieve the pain of anyone in world 1 unless you completely relieve the pain of everyone, since otherwise the total amount of pain will remain the same. And it could even be bad to partially relieve the pain of anyone, since you might end up increasing the total amount of pain in the world.

Reply 2: Suppose that you and I are, at the same time, experiencing qualitatively identical pains: I stubbed my toe, while you stubbed your toe. If IIE is true, then there is just one pain between us. So if IIE is true, then my pain has the same cause as yours, since everything has the same cause as itself. But my pain wasn’t caused by you stubbing your toe.

Objection: One lesson you could take from IIE is that something really weird happens when two people have qualitatively identical experiences at the same time. But a different lesson you could take from IIE is that two people never have qualitatively identical experiences at the same time. And that doesn’t seem so strange. After all, even if my pain feels extremely similar to your pain, there might always be some subtle difference between them.

Reply 1: Leibniz had an a priori argument that no two leaves are exactly the same shape. Most people think that there must be something wrong with that argument, because that’s not the sort of thing you can know a priori. I think the same goes for experiences as goes for leaves. Whether two people ever have qualitatively identical experiences at the same time is not the sort of thing you can know a priori. So at the very least, those who accept IIE are hostage to the possibility that some people do have qualitatively identical experiences at the same time.

Reply 2: Even if, as it turns out, no two people ever actually have qualitatively identical experiences at the same time, it is at least physically possible for this to happen. And this is enough to show that IIE is false. For example, it is physically possible for there to be a complete physical duplicate of me on the other side of the universe who is always experiencing what I am experiencing. If IIE is true, then my experiences have the same causes his experiences, since our experiences are numerically identical. But it is physically impossible for my experiences to be caused by something that happens to someone on the other side of the universe.⁴

Dualism says that, although physical objects exist, minds (including experiences) are non-physical. Idealism says that (i) only minds fundamentally exist, and (ii) minds are non-physical. ↩︎
I’m assuming that if something is non-physical then it’s not spatially located. I guess I can imagine views on which something can be both non-physical and spatially located (ghosts?), but I’m going to stipulate that by ‘physical’ I mean to include everything that is spatially located. So if you think that minds are spatially located, then you don’t count as a dualist or idealist on my definitions of ‘dualist’ and ‘idealist’. ↩︎
Physicalism says that everything, including minds and experiences, is fundamentally physical. ↩︎
I know of two papers and one book that discuss ideas related to the ideas in this post. One paper is Bostrom’s ‘Quantity of experience: brain-duplication and degrees of consciousness’ (2006). In the paper, he uses a thought experiment involving qualitatively identical experiences to make a point about degrees of consciousness. The other paper is Van Cleave’s ‘Time, Idealism, and the Identity of Indiscernibles’ (2002). In the paper, he criticizes an argument by Jorge Louis Borges for the unreality of time, which on Van Cleave’s reconstruction relies on the identity of indiscernibles and a premise about qualitatively identical experiences. The book is Kim’s Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (2005). In a chapter arguing against substance dualism, he uses the non-locality of immaterial experiences to argue that they could not be causally efficacious (chapter 3, especially pp. 85-8). ↩︎

Transitioning to tech: A guide for philosophers

Sat, 19 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Before becoming a software engineer, I was a Ph.D. student in philosophy. I get the sense that many Ph.D. students and Ph.D. recipients who lack tenure-track jobs stay in academia not because they want to be there, but because they can’t see a way out.

This is a mistake. One option, which I’ll talk about here, is to become a software engineer. There are concrete steps that you can take right now and in the near future to prepare for a career in software engineering.

Even if you’re unsure whether you want to become a software engineer, it’s worth taking at least some of these steps. You will be happier and less stressed out when applying for academic jobs if you have a good exit plan ready.

Why software engineering? Because there’s huge demand for software engineers, you don’t need a relevant degree to get a job, you can teach yourself the necessary skills, it’s intellectually interesting, the pay is good, and philosophers make good software engineers.

How to prepare

Self-study

If you have never coded before, pick a language and learn the the basics of coding. “The basics” includes things like variables, arrays, loops, functions, and conditionals. These will be common to most languages you use. Python, JavaScript, and Ruby are good languages for beginners.

Once you know the basics, practice by writing simple algorithms. Project Euler has coding challenges that you can practice with. LeetCode, HackerRank, and Codewars are other poplar coding challenge websites.

At some point you should start building actual applications. The Odin Project is a useful guide if you’re interested in web development.

You should spend most of your study time writing code. But there are a couple of books that you should read. One is Cracking the Coding Interview. It’s marketed as a job prep guide, but it’s also useful as a computer science reference. Another is Clean Code, especially chapters 2-4.

Courses at your university

As a Ph.D. student at Cornell, I was allowed to take any course, at no extra cost to me, including undergraduate courses outside my area of study. I took advantage of this opportunity to take computer science courses. Check whether your university gives you the same opportunity.

Online courses

MIT OpenCourseWare and edX have computer science courses freely available. I haven’t tried them, but if you are unable to take computer science courses at your university, this might be a good alternative.

Udemy and Udacity also offer coding-related courses, though when I tried Udacity I found it to be frustratingly slow paced. My sense is that you should rely on sites like Udemy and Udacity only if you find it impossible to make progress on your own.

Coding bootcamps

What: A coding bootcamp is an intensive course in software engineering. Most bootcamps run for around three months and involve 60 to 70 hours of work a week. If you graduate from a good bootcamp, you can expect to get a software engineering job within a few months of graduation.

To be clear, you attend a bootcamp for the skills it gives you, not the credential. In a job interview, you would generally downplay the fact that you attended a bootcamp.

Cost: Most bootcamps cost around $10,000 to $20,000. Some give you the option of signing an income sharing agreement. That means you pay nothing upfront, but pay a certain percentage of your salary for a certain amount of time after you get a job. 17% for two years is a common rate I’ve seen. If you can afford it, paying upfront is probably the better option.

Picking a bootcamp: Many bootcamps are bad. You should attend a good one, not a bad one. How can you tell whether a bootcamp is good? Online reviews of bootcamps (for example, on Switchup or Course Report), including bad bootcamps, are generally extremely positive. Ignore them.

Instead, carefully study the outcome reports of the bootcamps that interest you. An outcome report should include the bootcamp’s graduation rate, the six-month employment rate of its graduates, the average starting salary of its employed graduates, and a breakdown of the positions of its employed graduates (for example, permanent vs. temporary). Do not attend a bootcamp that refuses to provide this information.

Beware that many bootcamps present this information in a misleading way. For example, the reported employment rate is often calculated in a way that excludes certain graduates who failed to find jobs. If a bootcamp claims to have a 95% employment rate, it’s probably lying. (For a good bootcamp, something in the ballpark of 85% is more realistic.) CIRR has good, non-misleading outcome reports for many bootcamps.

The application process: A good bootcamp will require you to pass a technical interview before admitting you. The best bootcamps have admissions rates below 10%, though most allow re-applications from those not initially offered admission. Plan to spend a few weeks studying before the interview. If you are completely new to coding, budget more study time. The bootcamp will likely provide a study guide to give you a sense of what they expect you to know before the interview.

A note on getting a Master’s in Computer Science

This is probably a bad idea. See Jeff Kaufman’s thoughts:

[E]mployers don’t consider one to be a strong signal and most of what you learn isn’t relevant to working as a programmer. In most places I’ve worked, someone with N years of work experience is more valuable than someone with a Masters and N-2 years of experience. Financially these differ enormously in a way that makes a Masters clearly not worth it: not only do you pay tuition but you ‘pay’ the opportunity cost of two fewer years of employment (~$200k).

The job search process

Where to find job postings

All the usual places (Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc.)
AngelList, which caters to startups
Hacker News’s monthly “Who’s Hiring” threads
- The job postings from these are helpfully collected at HNHIRING
Stack Overflow Jobs
The “careers” page on a company’s website

How to write a resume

Model it on this template.

Limit yourself to one page. Focus on your technical skills and the software applications you’ve built. Resist the temptation to put your Ph.D. or academic work front and center: you want to look like a software engineer, not a philosopher.

Typical application stages

You apply to a company
You do a non-technical phone screen interview with a recruiter
You do a technical phone screen interview with a software engineer
You do a take-home coding project
You do an onsite (the equivalent of a flyout in academia)

The exact stages vary by company. For example, some don’t bother with non-technical phone screens, and many don’t give take-home coding projects.

The only required application materials are a resume and cover letter. Unlike in academia, references are requested mostly as a formality and only after the company intends to make you an offer.

During interviews you’ll get questions that range from behavioral (“Tell me about yourself”) to technical (“How are variables scoped in JavaScript?"). Be prepared to talk about software applications that you’ve built.

Most onsites involve a whiteboarding interview, in which you’ll be asked to work out the solution to a coding challenge on a whiteboard. The coding challenge websites from section 2.1 will help you prepare for this.

Reasons for optimism

Even if you currently have no coding experience, you have probably taken at least one or two logic courses. This will make it easier for you to pick up coding.
Soft skills matter. Writing “good communicator” on your resume won’t help you get a job, but demonstrating good communication skills in an interview will.
The odds are good. Unlike in philosophy, if you work hard and are even competent, then you will probably get a job within months of starting your job search.

Other resources

More advice on transitioning to tech from Jeff Kaufman
Cracking the Tech Career, by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the author of Cracking the Coding Interview
- discusses networking, resume and cover letter writing, interviewing, and offer negotiation
Job search advice from Felix Feng, a bootcamp grad
Salary negotiation advice from Patrick McKenzie
General advice for academics who are seeking non-academic jobs from Nate Meyvis, a philosophy Ph.D. and software engineer

The argument from predictive success

Sat, 07 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

On episode 17 of the 80,000 Hours Podcast, MacAskill presents three arguments for utilitarianism. One is the argument from predictive success:

When you look at scientific theories, how do you decide whether they’re good or not? Well, to a significant part by the predictions they’ve made. We can do that to some extent, but with a much smaller sample size, with moral theories as well. For example, we can look at the predictions, the bold claims that were going against common sense at the time, that Bentham and Mill made. Compare [them] to the predictions, bold moral claims, that Kant made.

When you look at Bentham and Mill, they were extremely progressive. They campaigned and argued for women’s right to vote and the importance of women getting a good education. They were very positive on sexual liberal attitudes. In fact, some of Bentham’s writings on the topic were so controversial that they weren’t even published 200 years later…

Contrast that with Kant. Here are some of the views that Kant believed. One was that suicide was wrong. One was that masturbation was even more wrong than suicide. Another was that organ donation is impermissible, and even that cutting your hair off to give it to someone else is not without some degree of moral error.¹

Of course, Bentham, Mill, and Kant weren’t actually making predictions when they made moral claims. MacAskill’s idea is just that the “bold” or controversial moral claims made by the early proponents of a moral theory count for or against it, depending on whether those claims are true. He thinks that this is analogous to how the predictions of a scientific theory count for or against it, depending on whether those predictions are realized.

Markovits, though not a utilitarian herself, presents the same argument in a Wi Phi lecture:

[Bentham] was an early defender of economic liberalization, freedom of expression, the separation of church and state, women’s rights, animal rights, the right to divorce, the abolition of slavery, the abolition of capital punishment, the abolition of corporal punishment, prison reform, and even the decriminalization of homosexual acts. Remember, this was 1789! Bentham recognized the moral importance of these rights, many of which are now uncontroversial. In this, he was well ahead of his time, and in large part, I would think, because of his embrace of utilitarianism. That, for me, counts heavily in favor of it as a moral theory.

I’ll first say a bit more to explain the core idea of the argument. Then I’ll state the argument more precisely, and raise some challenges to it.

The core idea of the argument

Most of the views that MacAskill and Markovits attribute to Bentham and Mill are no longer controversial. Mainstream proponents of every major moral theory, including Kantian ethics, accept them. Nonetheless, on utilitarian grounds, Bentham and Mill accepted these views when they were widely rejected. This, I take it, is what MacAskill and Markovits think supports utilitarianism. It’s not just that Bentham and Mill were right. It’s that they were right when most people were wrong.

Why is this supposed to support utilitarianism?

Well, suppose that you’re developing a moral theory in 2019, when women’s suffrage is widely supported. If you notice that your theory entails that women should not have the right to vote, then you will simply change your theory—possibly in an ad hoc way—to avoid this consequence. So the fact that your final theory is right about women’s suffrage doesn’t necessarily reflect some insight that your theory has about morality. It might just reflect the fact that you copied from a better moral theory than your own.

In contrast, suppose that you’re developing a moral theory in 1789, when women’s suffrage is widely opposed. If your theory entails that women should have the right to vote, that’s probably not because you made an ad hoc change to it to get this consequence. If anything, you would have to resist the urge to change your theory to avoid this consequence. So unless you just got lucky, the fact that your theory is right about women’s suffrage probably reflects some insight that your theory has about morality.

Assessing the argument (version 1)

That’s the core idea of the argument, but I still haven’t stated the argument precisely. Here is one way to make it more precise:

Many of the bold moral claims made by the early utilitarians are true.
The best explanation of (1) is that utilitarianism itself is true.
So, probably, utilitarianism is true.

(1) should be uncontroversial. Again, the claims in question are things like “women should have the right to vote” and “girls and women should have the same access to education as boys and men do”.

The action is at (2). This is where the core idea comes in. Why is the best explanation of (1) supposed to be that utilitarianism is true? Well, since the claims in question were widely rejected, Bentham and Mill weren’t copying from some generally accepted moral theory. So one alternative explanation of (1) is ruled out. Another alternative explanation of (1) is that Bentham and Mill just got lucky. But this seems unlikely, especially because so many of their bold moral claims are true.

Still, there are other explanations of (1). The most obvious alternative explanations are those that say that utilitarianism is false, but that it has at least some insights about morality. (You will be drawn to these explanations if you already think that utilitarianism is false.) There are many possibilities here, including:

Consequentialism is true, but hedonism is false. Nonetheless, happiness is one good thing, and maximizing happiness often ends up maximizing the good.
Consequentialism is false, but only because there are side-constrains that limit what you can permissibly do in pursuit of the good. But side-constraints are irrelevant to the cases in question. For example, women’s suffrage doesn’t violate anyone’s rights.
Utilitarianism is badly misguided. Nonetheless, it is right to reject arbitrary distinctions between groups of people, including men and women. And this was enough to get Bentham and Mill to reject traditional sexist beliefs.

In order to defend (2), a proponent of the argument must rule out these other explanations of (1). And it is not obvious to me how to do this without making an independent argument for utilitarianism.

How big of a problem is this for the argument? The first two alternative explanations of (1) might not be a huge problem. Although they are inconsistent with utilitarianism, they grant that it is at least pretty close to the truth. So a proponent of the argument could accept that they are plausible explanations of (1), and then weaken the argument’s conclusion to say that utilitarianism is at least pretty close to the truth. This is still an important conclusion, since many people think that utilitarianism is not even close to the truth.

It’s the third alternative explanation of (1), and explanations like it, that are a bigger problem for the argument. This explanation denies that utilitarianism is even close to the truth. So you can’t grant that this is a plausible explanation of (1) while still concluding that utilitarianism is at least pretty close to the truth. The explanation does concede that utilitarianism is not wrong about everything, but even the staunchest opponents of utilitarianism were already willing to concede this.

To be clear, the “no arbitrary distinctions” explanation is just an example of the sort of explanation that is a problem for the argument. By itself, it can’t account for all of the successes of Bentham and Mill. For example, being anti-capital punishment doesn’t seem to have anything to do with rejecting arbitrary distinctions. So an anti-utilitarian would have to either come up with a better explanation of (1), or add to the “no arbitrary distinctions” explanation an additional explanation that accounts for the other successes of Bentham and Mill.² But it’s not obvious to me that this is impossible.

Assessing the argument (version 2)

That’s one formulation of the argument. There is a different formulation of the argument, which is suggested by the contrast that MacAskill draws between the claims made by Bentham and Mill and the claims made by Kant. On this formulation, the argument aims to show not that utilitarianism is true, but rather that it is closer to the truth than Kantian ethics is:

The bold moral claims made by the early utilitarians are, for the most part, closer to the truth than the bold moral claims made by Kant.
The best explanation of (1) is that utilitarianism itself is closer to the truth than Kantian ethics is.
So, probably, utilitarianism is closer to the truth than Kantian ethics is.

Here I think (2) is plausible, provided that (1) is true.³ The problem is with (1). In the above quote, MacAskill defends it by comparing the greatest hits of Bentham and Mill (for example, support for women’s suffrage) with the greatest misses of Kant (for example, opposition to organ donation). That’s not a fair comparison. To accurately assess (1), we would have to compare a representative sample of Bentham’s and Mill’s bold claims to a representative sample of Kant’s bold claims.⁴

This is not to say that (1) is false. Maybe even if we were to do a fair comparison, we would conclude that the bold moral claims made by Bentham and Mill are, for the most part, closer to the truth than the bold moral claims made by Kant. But at the very least, MacAskill doesn’t adequately defend it in the above quote. (To be fair to MacAskill, he was presenting the argument informally in a podcast, where he had lots to talk about apart from this argument.)

This is a slightly cleaned-up quote from the episode transcript. ↩︎
If an opponent of the argument takes the second option (that is, if they give different explanations of the different successes of Bentham and Mill), then the anti-utilitarian explanation of (1) arguably starts to look less plausible than the simpler and more unified explanation that utilitarianism is true. ↩︎
But even (2) could be denied. For example, Kantain ethics is less precise than utilitarianism is, and leaves more room for judgment calls. This might make those applying it more susceptible to bad influences from their culture than those applying utilitarianism, even if Kantian ethics is closer to the truth than utilitarianism is. ↩︎
An obvious challenge here is figuring out what a “representative sample” of someone’s bold moral claims includes. Proponents of Kantian ethics might want to emphasize Kant’s more general claims about the importance of human dignity and autonomy. Opponents of Kantian ethics might, like MacAskill, want to emphasize Kant’s claims about suicide and organ donation. ↩︎

Moral realism and alien invasions

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Moral realism is the view that there are objective moral truths—objective in that they hold independently of our beliefs, attitudes, and preferences.¹ For example, if it is an objective truth that torturing people is wrong, then torturing people would still be wrong even if we all had pro-torture beliefs, attitudes, and preferences. Intuitively, moral realists think that morality is out there in the world, not in our heads.

Does the truth or falsity of moral realism have any practical consequences? There are some trivial ways in which in might. For example, if moral realism is true, then maybe philosophy journals should publish fewer articles developing anti-realist moral views than they currently do. A bit less trivially, if moral realism is false, then maybe we should care less about morality than many moral realists currently do.

But are there any more significant practical consequences of the truth or falsity of moral realism? I think there might be.

The Three-Body Problem is a sci-fi trilogy by Liu Cixin. The novels revolve around an alien invasion of Earth. In the afterword to the second novel of the series, Cixin makes the following comment:

[W]hen [humans] gaze up at the stars, they turn sentimental and believe that if extraterrestrial intelligences exist, they must be bound by universal, noble, moral constraints, as if cherishing and loving different forms of life are parts of a self-evident universal code of conduct. I think it should be precisely the opposite…[W]e should be ever vigilant, and be ready to attribute the worst of intentions to any Others that might exist in space.

Here is one interpretation of Cixin’s comment. Cixin is implicitly assuming that moral realism is false. And he draws a practical consequence from this: that we should “be ever vigilant” of aliens. This might involve not giving aliens directions to Earth (as happens in the novels), and preparing defenses of Earth if we learn of the existence of relatively nearby aliens.

Why is this practical consequence supposed to follow from the falsity of moral realism? My guess is that Cixin has something like the following argument in mind:

Moral realism is false.
So aliens are less likely to share our moral beliefs than they otherwise would be.
So, in particular, they are less likely to share our belief that it is wrong to (say) enslave intelligent creatures than they otherwise would be.
So they are more likely to try to enslave humans than they otherwise would be.
So we should “be ever vigilant” of aliens.

There are many ways to resist this argument, even granting (1). Nonetheless, I think core idea of the argument is reasonable. Here I’ll focus on the the move from (1) to (2).

To see why (2) is supposed to follow from (1), start by supposing that moral realism is true. If moral realism is true, then the truth that it is wrong to enslave intelligent creatures is out there in the world, waiting to be discovered, like the truth that nothing can travel faster than light, or the truth that momentum is conserved. And aliens probably do share our beliefs that nothing can travel faster than light and that momentum is conserved, provided that they are sufficiently intelligent.

In contrast, if moral realism is false, then moral truths are not out there in the world, waiting to be discovered. Instead, either there are no moral truths at all, or there are moral truths but they depend on us. In the second case, moral truths are like truths about what’s funny or what tastes good. And, the thought is, aliens probably don’t share either our false beliefs or our beliefs about non-objective matters like what’s funny or what tastes good.

It might be objected that there was evolutionary pressure on us to form certain moral beliefs. (In fact, some prominent opponents of moral realism claim precisely this.) If aliens faced the same evolutionary pressure as us, then maybe we should expect them to share our moral beliefs even if moral realism is false. But even if this is right, it still seems more likely that aliens share our moral beliefs if moral realism is true than if it is false. And this is enough to support the move from (1) to (2).

At least, this is what I will mean by ‘moral realism’. Sometimes the term is used to refer to other views. ↩︎

The Bodhicaryāvatāra

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Chapter VIII of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra contains some of the most interesting arguments in the history of philosophy. More philosophers should read it.

Excerpt

94 I should dispel the suffering of others because it is suffering like my own suffering. I should help others too because of their nature as beings, which is like my own being.

95 When happiness is liked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I strive after happiness only for myself?

96 When fear and suffering are disliked by me and others equally, what is so special about me that I protect myself and not the other?

97 If I give them no protection because their suffering does not afflict me, why do I protect my body against future suffering when it does not afflict me?

98 The notion ‘it is the same me even then’ is a false construction, since it is one person who dies, quite another who is born…

101 The continuum of consciousnesses, like a queue, and the combination of constituents, like an army, are not real. The person who experiences suffering does not exist. To whom will that suffering belong?

102 Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone. They must be warded off simply because they are suffering. Why is any limitation put on this?¹

Analysis

There are at least three lines of argument in the above passage.

The Your-Pains-Aren’t-Special Argument (verses 94-6)

Your pain and the pains of other people are the same in all relevant respects.
It two things are the same in all relevant respects, then it is irrational to treat them differently.
Therefore, it is irrational to treat your pain differently from the pains of other people.

(2) is plausible, but it is unclear whether (1) is true. Even if a given pain of mine feels the same as a given pain of yours (so the pains are intrinsically identical to each other), I stand in different relations to them: my pain is mine, and your pain is yours. This might be a relevant difference. After all, there are many cases where you should treat two intrinsically identical things differently simply because of the relations you stand in to them. For example, I should go to the cafe next to my apartment and not one on the other side of town, even if the two cafes are intrinsically identical.

Of course, Śāntideva goes on to deny that pains have owners: “Without exception, no sufferings belong to anyone” (verse 102). So he wouldn’t be moved by this objection.

The parallel between your future pains and the pains of other people (verses 97-8)

In verses 97-8, Śāntideva isn’t positively arguing that you have reason to care about the pains of other people. Instead, he is objecting to an argument which aims to show that you have no reason to care about the pains of other people. The argument that he is objecting to goes like this:

If you don’t feel a pain, then you have no reason to care about it.
You don’t feel the pains of other people.
Therefore, you have no reason to care about the pains of other people.

Call this ‘the egoist argument’.

Śāntideva objects to (1). He points out that you don’t (now) feel your future pains, but you still have reason to care about them. But if (1) were true, then you wouldn’t have reason to care about your future pains. So (1) is false: you can have reason to care about a pain even if you don’t feel it.

I think Śāntideva is right to deny (1). But the egoist argument can be changed to avoid Śāntideva’s objection. The obvious fix is to replace (1) with

(1*) If you don’t now feel a pain, and never will feel it, then you have no reason to care about it.

and change (2) accordingly. (1*) isn’t vulnerable to Śāntideva’s objection, since you will feel your future pains even though you don’t now feel them. (In contrast, you will never feel the pains of other people.) So the mere fact that you have reason to care about your future pains gives us no reason to deny (1*).

Śāntideva anticipates this response to his objection, and responds to it by denying that you will feel “your” future pains. This is because, he claims, persons do not persist through time: “it is one person who dies, quite another who is born” (verse 98). So the person feeling pain in the future is not you. This is an extreme claim. But if it is true, then Śāntideva can make the same argument against (1*) that he made against (1): you will never feel “your” future pains, but you still have reason to care about them.

The Persons-Don’t-Exist Argument (verses 101-2)

Persons don’t exist.
If persons don’t exist, then it is irrational to care about who feels a given pain.
Therefore, it is irrational to care about who feels a given pain.

(2) is plausible, but (1) is implausibly extreme: it endorses nihilism about persons. A less extreme and more plausible view is reductionism about persons, which admits that persons exist but denies that they are fundamental. Here is how Parfit (1984) characterizes reductionism about persons: “A person’s existence just consists in the existence of a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental events” (p. 211).

We could then try changing the argument to say ‘persons are non-fundamental’ instead of ‘persons don’t exist’:

Persons are non-fundamental.
If persons are non-fundamental, then it is irrational to care about who feels a given pain.
Therefore, it is irrational to care about who feels a given pain.

Although this change makes (1) more plausible, it makes (2) less plausible. On the face of it, whether persons are fundamental is irrelevant to whether it is rational to care about who feels a given pain. Even if I am just “a brain and body, and the occurrence of a series of interrelated physical and mental events”, why shouldn’t I care more about the pains connected to this brain, body, and series of physical and mental events?

Similar arguments from other philosophers

It is surprising that the Bodhicaryāvatāra isn’t better known among contemporary philosophers, especially because Sidgwick and Parfit (two very famous philosophers) have developed arguments that are similar to Śāntideva’s arguments. For example, here is a famous passage from Sidgwick’s (1874) Methods of Ethics:

If the Utilitarian has to answer the question, ‘Why should I sacrifice my own happiness for the greater happiness of another?’, it must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist, ‘Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?’ It undoubtedly seems to Common Sense paradoxical to ask for a reason why one should seek one’s own happiness on the whole: but I do not see how the demand can be repudiated as absurd by those who adopt the views of the extreme empirical school of psychologists, although those views are commonly supposed to have a close affinity with Egoistic Hedonism. Grant that the Ego is merely a system of coherent phenomena, that the permanent identical ‘I’ is not a fact but a fiction [i.e., grant reductionism about persons], as Hume and his followers maintain: why, then, should one part of the series of feelings into which the Ego is resolved be concerned with another part of the same series, any more than with any other series? (book III, chapter 2)

Parfit quotes this passage in Reasons and Persons and goes on to develop an argument that is inspired by it. He also also defends reductionism about persons and develops a version of the Persons-Don’t-Exist argument. See below for references.

The partial fulfillment of moral obligations

Sun, 21 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Some moral obligations can be partially fulfilled. For example, suppose that vegetarianism is morally required. If you eat meat only once a week, then you are partially fulfilling the moral obligation to be vegetation. Or suppose that you are morally required to give 10% of your income to charity. If you give 5%, then you are partially fulfilling the moral obligation to give 10%.

Now compare the following:

100% vegetarianism
99% vegetarianism
98% vegetarianism

(1) is morally better than (2), which is morally better than (3). But is the moral difference between (1) and (2) greater than the moral difference difference between (2) and (3)? Is there something especially morally good about fully fulfilling a moral obligation? Is going from (2) to (1) morally better than going from (3) to (2)?

Another way of getting at the same point: (3) is morally worse than (2), which is morally worse than (1). But is there something especially morally bad about not fully fulfilling a moral obligation? Is going from (1) to (2) morally worse than going from (2) to (3)? If so, then there is diminishing marginal moral badness to meat eating: eating the first hamburger is morally worse than eating the second hamburger.

For vegetarianism, I’d lean towards saying that the moral difference between (1) and (2) equals the moral difference between (2) and (3). But we might want to say different things about different moral obligations. For example, consider the moral obligation to be faithful to your romantic partner by not cheating on him or her. Compare the following:

100% faithfulness
99% faithfulness
98% faithfulness

In this case, it seems clear to me that going from (1) to (2) is morally worse than going from (2) to (3): the moral difference between cheating zero times and cheating one time is greater than the moral difference between cheating one time and cheating two times.

Assuming all this is right, what explains the difference between vegetarianism and faithfulness? One possible answer is that the marginal harm of faithlessness diminishes, but the marginal harm of meat eating does not diminish. But I’m not sure this explanation is right. One problem: if your cheating remains secret, then it’s arguably not harmful at all. But even in this case, it seems to me that going from 100% faithfulness to 99% faithfulness is morally worse than going from 99% faithfulness to 98% faithfulness.

Another possible answer is that the moral badness of faithlessness consists largely in the fact that it is a breach of trust. And 98% faithfulness is not a significantly further breach of trust than 99% faithfulness. In contrast, the moral badness of meat eating consists simply in the fact that it harms animals, not in any breach of trust. And going from 99% vegetarianism to 98% vegetarianism harms animals just as much as going from 100% vegetarianism to 99% vegetarianism does.

Complications

It’s unclear how to work out the exact to which you’ve fulfilled a moral obligation. For example, is the extent to which you’ve fulfilled the moral obligation to be vegetarian proportional to the number of non-vegetarian meals you’ve eaten, the number of animals you’ve eaten, the pounds of meat you’ve eaten, or something else?
I asked how “morally good” it is to fulfill a moral obligation to various extents. This can be understood in a couple different ways:
- The praiseworthiness of fulfilling the moral obligation to a given extent
- The strength of the moral reason to fulfill the moral obligation to a given extent
Your actions can influence other people. Even if 100% fulfillment of a moral obligation is not in itself disproportionately morally good, it might set a good example. Conversely, anything less than 100% fulfillment might set a bad example. If this is right, then going from 99% vegetarianism to 100% vegetarianism might do more good than going from 98% vegetarianism to 99% vegetarianism, in virtue of the influence you have on others.

Misleading Lighthouse Labs employment statistics

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lighthouse Labs is a Canadian coding bootcamp. They claim that 93% of their job seeking graduates from the past five years were employed within 120 days of graduating, and 98% were employed “within 120 days or more”.¹ This is false, and they should stop saying it. Their own data shows that the actual employment rate of their job seeking graduates is at most around 73%. The rest of this post explains this in more detail.

According to Lighthouse Labs' five-year outcomes report, they had 1,504 graduates in the past five years. Of these, 977 have found employment. 977/1,504 ≈ 0.65. So the employment rate of all their graduates is 65%.

Question: How did Lighthouse Labs get from an actual employment rate of 65% to a stated employment rate of 93% or more? Answer: Their stated 93%+ employment rates include only “job seeking” graduates, and they don’t classify all of their graduates as job seeking. In fact, they classify more than a third of their graduates (512 of 1,504) as non-job seeking.

This should strike you as, at best, extremely surprising. If this classification is accurate, it means that more than a third of their graduates were willing to spend nearly $10,000 on very narrow technical full-time training without intending to get a job at the end of it.

And, it turns out, Lighthouse Labs' outcomes report shows that this classification is inaccurate. The report states that 1,346 graduates completed a “job seeking cycle”. That’s 354 more than they classified as job seekers. So Lighthouse Labs is counting graduates who sought jobs as non-job seekers. If instead you count everyone who sought a job as a job seeker, then at most only 11% of their graduates are non-job seekers. The employment rate of job seekers then works out to 73%—not, as Lighthouse Labs advertises, 93% or 98%.

The discrepancy between those they classify as job seekers and actual job seekers is explained in a footnote in the report.² As best I can tell, they classify as job seekers only those who either (i) succeeded in finding a job, or (ii) are currently looking for a job with the help of their career services. So if you tried and failed to find a job, and then stopped using their career services, they don’t count you as a job seeker. In other words, they count the successes, but not the failures. That’s an easy way to get a high employment rate!

When I first noticed this, I assumed that I was misunderstanding something, so I emailed Lighthouse Labs to ask for clarification. After many emails back and forth with them, I was unable to get an intelligible explanation of what they mean by “job seeker” if not what I say in the previous paragraph. Eventually they stopped replying to my emails.

Do other coding bootcamps play with their statistics in this way? I’m not sure, but for at least some coding bootcamps there are good, non-misleading statistics from The Council on Integrity in Results Reporting. From their website:

The Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR) is a non-profit organization whose members believe that prospective students should know a school’s outcomes before deciding whether to enroll. The CIRR standards prevent deceptive graduation and job placement marketing practices and ensure a student can trust what a school advertises.

If you are thinking of attending a coding bootcamp, I’d recommend checking whether they report to CIRR.

They make this claim both on their website (archive link) and in a report on their student outcomes of the past five years. They don’t let you download the report directly from their website (they’ll email it to you if you give them your email address), but I’ve uploaded a copy of the version of the report that I’m working with. ↩︎
Footnote 1 on page 5. It’s a footnote to a claim about graduates “considered as job seekers”. The footnote clarifies that these are “[g]raduates who are seeking employment and actively engaging with Lighthouse Labs Career Services team or have become employed post-graduation”. ↩︎

Two metaphors for aging and death

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

‘The Simile of the Mountain’, in Saṃyutta Nikāya 3:25:

[Buddha:] “What do you think, great king? Suppose a man would come to you from the east, one who is trustworthy and reliable, and would tell you: ‘For sure, great king, you should know this: I am coming from the east, and there I saw a great mountain high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do whatever you think should be done, great king…’”

“If, venerable sir, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, the human state being so difficult to obtain, what else should be done but to live by the Dhamma, to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the Dhamma, to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?"¹

Bostrom, ‘The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant’:

Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannised by a giant dragon. The dragon stood taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil smelling yellowish green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood curdling tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the dragon tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed… (p. 273)

The general ethical argument in the fable is simple: there are obvious and compelling moral reasons for the people in the fable to get rid of the dragon. Our situation with regard to human senescence is closely analogous and ethically isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable with regard to the dragon. Therefore, we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence. (p. 277)

Translation from Bohdi (ed.), In the Buddha’s Words, p. 26. ↩︎

Moral offsetting bibliography

Sun, 03 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is a non-exhaustive list of writings on or related to the idea of moral offsetting: the idea that good actions can offset bad actions in a way analogous to carbon offsetting. For example, a meat eater might try to offset his consumption of meat by donating to an animal welfare charity.

Published philosophical work

Foerster (2019), ‘Moral Offsetting’
- written by me
Driver (2014), ‘Moral Bookkeeping, Consequentialism, and Carbon Offsets’
MacAskill (2015), Doing Good Better
- discusses moral offsetting at pp. 142-3
Ord (2015), ‘Moral Trade’
- mentions moral offsetting at p. 123 under the label of ‘intrapersonal moral trade’
Chan and Crummett (2019), ‘Moral Indulgences: When Offsetting is Wrong’
- uses the idea of moral offsetting to respond to the problem of evil

Blog posts

Alexander (2015), ‘Ethics Offsets’
Alexander (2015), ‘Vegetarianism for Meat Eaters’
Alexander (2017), ‘Contra Askell on Moral Offsets’
Askell (2016), ‘Can we offset immorality?' (archive link)
Chappell (2018), ‘Three kinds of offsetting’
Foerster (2019), ‘Carbon offsetting ≠ moral offsetting’
Kaufman (2015), ‘How bad is dairy?'
Levy (2015), ‘Moral Offsetting’
Wells (2014), ‘Is Moral Offsetting™ Right For You?'

Other

cheatneutral.com (now-defunct; archive link)
- parodied carbon offsets by pretending to sell offsets for cheating on your partner
Kinsley (2007), ‘Credit for Bad Behavior’
- compares carbon offsets to offsets for abusing your children
Monbiot (2006), ‘Selling Indulgences’
- compares carbon offsets to the sale of indulgences
Zabel (2016), ‘Ethical offsetting is antithetical to EA [effective altruism]'

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is Vacchablogga, a philosophy blog. You can find contact information on my personal website.

This site is hosted on Netlify. It’s built with Hugo and uses the Vac Theme. The favicon is based on an SVG image from the Wikimedia Commons.

Vacchablogga

What Billy Pilgrim learned from the Tralfamadorians

Excerpts

Analysis

Death doesn’t exist?

Death exists but isn’t bad?

Death exists and is bad, but isn’t as bad as it would otherwise be?

Death exists and is as bad as it otherwise would be, but we should still view it differently?

Similar quotes from real people

Academic work5

The doctrine of impermanence

What does the doctrine mean?

Is it true?

What are the psychological consequences of accepting it?

How should you act if it is true?

Deriving an 'is' from an 'ought'

Introduction

Examples

The structure of the arguments

Why the arguments fail

Further comments

China trip 2023: Practical notes

Visa

Payments

Internet restrictions

Language

Restaurants

Washrooms

Transportation

Buses and subways

Taxis

Ride-sharing apps

Bullet trains

Domestic flights

Tickets (for trains, museums, etc.)

Cell phone service

Covid restrictions

Traffic safety

Claims about nihilism

Book review: *Nine Cloud Dream*

Synopsis

Themes

Uselessness of meditation

Irrelevance of karma

Nihilist consequences of Buddhist metaphysics

Appendix: What does the Diamond Sutra actually say?

Theism and functionalism

Claim

Argument

Corollaries

Assessment

How strong is the fading qualia argument?

Introduction

Empirical evidence

Do we have empirical evidence that humans are reliable judges of their experiences?

If humans are reliable judges of their experiences, does it follow that (F) is true?

Is there possible empirical evidence for (F)?

Other principles like (F)

Skepticism about our experiences

Practical consequences

Conclusion

Notes on arguments

Reading

Numbered-premise arguments

Argument extraction

Argument evaluation

Argument repair

Deductive vs. inductive arguments

Exercises

Solutions

Highlights from *A Journal of a Plague Year*

Beneficiary preferences and cause prioritization

Introduction

Approaches to moral weights

Person-relative

Community-relative

Same-for-all

Weighting preferences beyond impact

Conclusion

Arguments for and against functionalism

Academic work⁵

Book review: Nine Cloud Dream

Highlights from A Journal of a Plague Year

The Bodhicaryāvatāra