The Problem of Induction: Raveswans and Niceholes.

So I'm taking Philosophy of Science this semester and lately we've been talking about the problem of Induction. Briefly, the problem of induction is that all science is thought to be based on inductive logic... and yet there's no rational reason for believing that inductive logic is justified, or at least you can't make any argument for it, without resorting to using inductive logic. No matter how you cut it, you're begging the question. This comes from David Hume, a smart dude, and it goes sort of like this: When you make an inductive prediction, you're either forced to add a proposition in your argument that says either, "The world will continue to be as it has been," or "the world is about to change very suddenly." If you go for the latter, you're no longer using induction, you're pretty much just guessing out of your ass. If you go for the former, you can't prove that the world is going to be as it has been without using an inductive argument which uses as one proposition "the world will continue to be as it has been." So induction is screwed.

So now. We're reading a few people who tried to get around that, and one of them gives the instantial model, which I don't feel like getting into. Essentially it says that any instance which agrees with an induced conclusion is evidence for it. It's not really crucial to my point. Anyway, in attempting ot defeat the instantial model, philosopher Nelson Goodman came up with two problems. They both revolve around ravens being black.

The first is pretty straightforward: All ravens are black. Any black raven we see, by the instantial model, works to help prove that. Over time these build up and we're pretty sure All ravens are black. Fairly straightforward. Then Goodman tries to defeat the instantial model with this neat logic trick which I heartily dislike but find fascinating: The counterpositive to all ravens are black is that all non-black things are non-ravens. These are seen as being logically equivalent to one another. But by the instantial model, then, any non-black thing which is also a non-raven is suppot for "all non-black things are non-ravens" and is logically equivalent to supporting the statement "all ravens are black." Which is to say, green leaves are thereby evidence that ravens are black. This is problematic! Now I have a slight quibble here because although the counterpositive is logically equivalent, I have issues with this relationship. It seems to me like evidence supporting the counterpositive shouldn't necessarily count as evidence in support of the original statement, but I've never taken logic (yeah, really) so I can't say why. Anyway, this isn't the point of this blog post.

Goodman's second point is really complicated. My beloved Professor Paul Davies (If you're one of those professors that creepily has a google news alert whenever someone blogs your name and thereby checks student blogs for references, Hi!) prefaced this by saying, "If you're at the bar and you really want to impress someone, tell them about this." Would that he had explained this last class, because I spent a better part of last night trying to impress girls at the bar. I'm way off topic.

Right. Goodman's second point: Let's make a fictitious category called Raveswans. We'll define them as: things which were ravens up until today, and things which today and onward are swans. They have the quality that up until today, they were black, and from today onward, they are white. Hence the statement, All Raveswans are Blight. Now, if we assume that this as a natural category existed, then any black ravens we saw in the past would be evidence for the statement. Which is fine. But the problem is that the statement includes information about the whiteness of swans. Ergo, any black ravens in the past, through this statement, are evidence that swans are white. We've got a major problem!

Now Professor Davies and most of my class didn't find this terribly interesting or important, I don't think, and most of their critiques seemed to rest on the problem that Raveswans aren't a natural category. There's no substantial mechanism linking them, so who cares? It's not really a relevant point to our lives. But here's where I went off on a brain-tangent and spent most of the rest of the class pondering: what if Raveswans were a natural category? Wouldn't it then be a real challenge to instantial induction?

So I had to find a natural category that could illustrate this. I began by thinking about this massive change from ravens to swans within the logic. Is there something in psychology, a field I know much better, that fits the model where something changes before and after a certain date? Then I remembered: Both anecdotally and on surveys, people noted that after 9/11, New Yorkers became MUCH nicer to each other. This is especially with respect to racial tensions (though I imagine Arabs or Muslims in general were left out of these data.) This was, for some reason, big news in the social psych world. In my opinion, it meshes perfectly with the results of the Robbers Cave Experiment and are thusly Not That Interesting, but whatever. So before 9/11, New Yorkers = assholes. After 9/11, New Yorkers = nice. I think you know where I'm going with this.

So I went up to Professor Davies after class and explained to him my reformulation with the statement, "All pre/post-9/11 New Yorkers are Niceholes." He laughed a lot and said it was really clever, which coming from him means quite a lot, as he's certainly one of the smartest people I've ever met.

He thought it over, and seemed to think that the catestrophic nature of 9/11 had something to do with why the scenarios weren't exactly logically equivalent. The Raveswans example, he said, works within nature, which is in general not subject to major changes. I have problems with this response, because I think that a) I think catastrophes happen in nature frequently enough that the same-old-same-old argument doesn't really hold much water and b) because that still has the underlying assumption from above that "The world will continue to be as it has been." Actually, come to think of it, a) and b) are pretty much the same problem. Anyway, Prof Davies said he'd think it over over the weekend and get back to me. But I think he was really impressed, which I don't think I've managed to do just yet. It's probably because I invented the word 'niceholes' and he truly appreciates the use of profanity in philosophy.




Anyway, here's a diagram from my notes from class today modified to include the niceholes. Let me know what you think the flaws in my logic are.

Brain of Theseus

Often, students and academics joke about the problems in their fields that keep them awake at night. Usually, I think, these are questions of philosophy but I've known people of other disciplines to be struck by insomnia when wondering about an archaeological site or the meaning of a poem, etc. For a while, I've been wondering about the meaning of this next problem. But until recently, I hadn't thought about it exactly this way. Now I'm not entirely convinced I'll ever sleep again. Convenient, as exams start next week and I have 25 pages of papers on ethics and psychology to write.

The Ship of Theseus
The ship of Theseus is an old philosophical problem of identity that goes like this: Suppose there's a ship, and every year, one plank of it is replaced. If the ship is made of, say, 200 planks, then in 200 years, we're faced with a problem: Is the ship which remains the same ship, or is it a different ship? And if it's different, at which point did it become different? Which plank was the last straw?

This is sort of fun, but it didn't become really interesting and terrifying until I remembered that neurons are being replaced at a constant rate, and that over a certain number of years (7? 12? I can never remember) every neuron in one's brain is replaced. Our brains are ships of Theseus. The problem is that we perceive our consciousness as being continuous. However, the mind is the brain. So the answer has to be that our consciousness is somehow connected to the structure and organization of the neurons. My identity is the exact shape of my brain. I maintain a constant, or at least continuous, personality because my brain is continuous across time, regardless of the existence or replacement of individual neurons.

Which brings us to an even bigger problem, as raised by my fantastic philosophy prof, Dr. Davies: If we took each old plank of the ship as it were being replaced and put it in a warehouse and then, 200 years later, reassembled the ship of Theseus, we would have two ships of exactly identical make. And yet they would not be the same ship. So which one would be the ship of Theseus, the one rebuilt of the original planks or the one that's been continuously sailed upon across those 200 years?

I mentioned my issue with neurons to Prof Davies, who responded simply: "Well that's easy, you aren't the same person from moment to moment." That's nice, and obviously he's correct, but that doesn't change the fact that I have the sensation of continuous consciousness.

Then I started thinking about science fiction. Imagine we could teleport. We would hop into a booth, which would scan our entire body (and, probably, the billions of bacteria that actually make up 90-99% of our body mass) and then transmit that data to another booth, which would decode it and fabricate a body exactly the same structure and initiate CPR to get the heart started. The beta body, possessing the same exact brain as the alpha body, would experience what? The memories and experiences and feelings leading right up until transportation, and then everything afterwords. In short, it would feel like waking up from a nap (on the other side of the universe). The beta body would have the sensation of continuous consciousness. What happens to the alpha body, then? If it disappears, it dies. The consciousness of alpha is not transferred to beta. Consciousness can't be transferred in any meaningful way. You've essentially cloned the body and mind.

But if consciousness can't be transferred, then how is consciousness transferred from my waking self yesterday to my waking self today, across the divide of all of 4 hours of sleep I got last night (and an all nighter tonight and tomorrow night, hooray)? The obvious answer, I think, is that it isn't. I'm not the same person who existed yesterday. His consciousness was gifted to me when I woke to the sound of my damn alarm this morning, but his consciousness ceased to exist when he went to sleep. In other words, we die each night when we go to sleep and are reanimated each morning. But I'm not the one being reanimated, it's a beta or gamma or however many iterations of the Greek alphabet are required after nearly 22 years of nights sleeping. When I go to sleep tonight, that's it. I'm dead.

I hope this doesn't trouble you as much as it troubles me.

Postscript, a note on style

I wrote this for my Medicine & Ethics class. We have been reading a series of books on genetic engineering and posthumanism, most recently Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls by Toffoletti. I knew that if I continued to just flat out disagree with every book we've read in class so far (which, considering how many of them are religious in nature, is safe to say is the truth), he'd nail me again on my grade. So I knew I had to agree with the book to get an A. But I also really needed to say my peace about this filth. So I wrote a post-script to attach to my paper explaining why the whole thing was nonsense, then never turned it in. Then I sat down and actually wrote an essay about the book, which did get me an A.

The funny thing was that most of this is based off of a book called Fashionable Nonsense, which I brought into class one day and laid on my desk. When my professor walked by, he commented, "that's a good book."

"Yeah, I got it out for Toffoletti."
"That's good to know," he said.

Then later I saw him in office hours and discussed it with him further. I got him to apologize for calling Dawkins and Dennet "throwaway names." He also suggested that I write my final paper on mandatory euthanasia for the elderly. I promise you, when that paper is finished it'll be up here. I expect it to be glorious.

Anyway, here's the post-script. Sorry for lacking the citation on Karl Popper. I can't find the damn book. At any rate, he's famous for saying that. I can't imagine anyone would disagree that that was one of his major ideas.

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Postscript, a note on style

While it is of course strictly irrelevant to the content of her work, something needs to be said about Toffoletti’s writing style in Cyborgs and Barbie Dolls (2007). From her reverent treatment of Jean Baudrillard, we know that Toffoletti is a product of the late 20^th century French intellectual schools which seem to believe, or even outright profess that, as Peter Medawar put it, “…thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear.” (Dawkins 2003) This certainly applies to Baudrillard and Toffoletti does the reader no favor by extensively quoting his ideas without providing particularly lucid explanations thereof.

But this style of writing, which appears to think that function follows form, stands in contrast with nearly every other form of academic writing in the following way: In other areas of academia, when a concept is particularly difficult, the prudent writer does her best to simplify it as much as possible. Bits of jargon from the field in question are given clear definitions at the outset; allusions, similes, and metaphors are made to areas which are already familiar to the reader and are done in such a way as to elucidate rather than obscure the topic under consideration; and examples are given as much context as is necessary to understand their significance. Toffoletti fails in all of these respects.

One might claim that Toffoletti is on firm ground, being that she’s writing in a style similar to that of the works on which she is basing her ideas. However, these writers are by no means blameless. Alan Sokal’s and Jean Bricmont’s (1997) Intellectual Impostures is an examination of the use of scientific terminology and jargon within postmodern writing. Jean Baudrillard, from whom Toffoletti draws the theoretical groundwork of her book, is given an entire chapter in which his writing is exposed as having at best a reckless disregard for the meaning of scientific concepts and at worst as having the intent to deliberately mislead the reader or prevent the reader from being able to disprove or even comment on the veracity of his statements. As a logical fallacy, this is known either as “Argument by Prestigious Jargon,” or “Argument By Gibberish (Bafflement).” I personally, as a writer, find these to be particularly heinous logical fallacies, though opinions on that vary, I’m sure.

As Richard Dawkins wrote in his review of the book,

But it’s tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so profound that most of us will not understand the language in which they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But how are we to tell the difference? (Dawkins 2003)

Exactly. Toffoletti is writing a decade after large portions of her intellectual hero’s work were exposed as intellectually fraudulent. Given the enormous cultural and academic impact of Sokal and Bricmont’s exposition of Baudrillard et al, we must assume that Toffoletti is familiar with their work and the notion that her obscurantist writing style is now closely associated with academic charlatanism. Additionally, we know from her lucid and intelligent introduction and conclusion that she is perfectly capable of writing clear sentences which get her meaning across. After examining closely Baudrillard’s use of scientific and mathematical terminology, Sokal and Bricmont characterize a passage as “trite observations about sociology or history.” (Dawkins 2003) If Toffoletti is making similarly trite claims, claims which could be expressed rather simply (as she does in the introduction), then one is left to conclude that she is deliberately obscuring meaning.

At this point one must speculate why a writer hoping to reach an audience might do this. Dawkins (2003) thinks that perhaps writers like this “have ambitions to succeed in academic life.” This makes sense. It is ‘publish or perish,’ after all.

Two other hypotheses come to mind. The first is that these writers use obscurantist language in order to display their own erudition. I hope that isn’t the case, as it means a significant portion of academics are behaving like children. In any case, most people opening a book by a prominent academic for the first time begin by giving her the benefit of that doubt that, if she managed to get a Ph. D, she must be at least reasonably intelligent.

The second hypothesis is my own, which is that these writers deliberately fashion their works so that they are impossible to refute. Take for example Toffoletti, who writes that simulations have become more real to us than the realities that they are meant to represent. In a simple and clear scientific paper, it would be ridiculously easy to test this hypothesis using empirical methods. However, Toffoletti writes a book filled with obscurantist jargon based on the work of Baudrillard, notorious for his contradictions and tautological statements. Why? Because the ideas in her book can be applied to all instances and in all cases. As Karl Popper wrote (citation!!!!), any hypothesis must be available to falsification. Hypotheses that cannot be falsified (he lists psychoanalysis, among others, and Jacques Lacan, I’m looking at you) can also not be accepted (or ‘proved’ insofar as that’s possible within the philosophy of science). Toffoletti has written a book nearly immune to refutation, or at least based on theories which fit that description. A hypothesis which is immune to refutation is no hypothesis at all, but we wouldn’t even know that because it is still too difficult to parse her obscurantist prose.

But independent of the possible veracity of Toffoletti’s claims is the problem of Toffoletti’s writing style. It is patently unclear, obscurantist, and full of obscure or at least unfamiliar (to most readers) references. The result is that her book has the appearance of being erudite, polished, and airtight. But instead the book leaves a lingering question, an echo of the one voiced originally by Sokal and Bricmont, then later by Dawkins: Is the emperor wearing invisible clothes, or is he just naked?

Works cited

Dawkins, R. (2003) Postmodernism Disrobed. In A Devil’s Chaplain (pp 47.–53). Boston: Mariner Books.

Popper, K (date)

Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J. (1997). Fashionable nonsense: Postmodern intellectuals’ abuse of science. Retrieved from http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/book_american_v2d_typeset_preface+chap1.pdf

Toffoletti, K. (2007) Cyborgs and Barbie dolls: feminism, popular culture, and the posthuman body. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.

Thomas Nagel Meets Batman

Sociobiology Vs. Evolutionary Psychology

In class two days ago, my professor drew two flowcharts to illustrate the differences between traditional sociobiology as created by E.O. Wilson in the late 1970s versus Evolutionary Psychology as it is understood today.

Here's the Sociobio flowchart:

This is a pretty clear flowchart in my mind, and it can account for the behavior of most animals, except for the most cognitively developed apes, plus probably dolphins, whales, and elephants.

Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, must take cognition into effect (given the cognitive revolution, which was taking place about the same time historically as the creation of Sociobiology and thus could not have had a huge effect on its construction and application to humans), among many other things.

Here's Evo Psych:

I felt a sort-of religious awe when I saw this flow chart, which seems to account for and map out nearly ever aspect of psychology (excepting sensation and perception, and probably personality theory). What I particularly like about this chart is that it shuts up two major criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology:

1. The classic Anthropologist's critique, which says that Evolutionary Psychology is reductionistic of human behavior. This flow chart is hardly reductive, especially as compared to the sociobiological map. I firmly believe that when anthropologists are critiquing evolutionary psychology, they're actually critiquing Sociobiology and aren't aware of the major differences.
2. It also quiets Lickliter's and Honeycutt's critique, which says that EP is does not account for possible changes relating to human development. Clearly this is fallacious, as there has always been Evolutionary Developmental Psychology, and this clearly lays that out.

Anyway, I was so inspired by these charts that I simply had to share them with the world.

Stephen Jay Gould

I know, I know: de mortuis nihil nisi bonum. But I couldn't resist.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-overlapping_magisteria)

Edit: About an hour after I posted this, my professor reminisced about the time he met Stephen J. Gould, saying, "He was a dick. He just had his own agenda and everyone else had to get out of the way. Hewasn't interested in discussing it or taking questions. " I feel less bad about making fun of dead people now.

Habermas’ use of Free Will in The Future of Human Nature

Sorry about the radio silence, guys. It seems that summer was less conducive to real scholarly work than I had hoped it might be when I created this blog.

I have a more light-hearted work coming soon, hopefully to be up within the next few weeks.

Anyway, this one comes from my Medicine & Ethics class. I just turned it in this morning, and I'm sincerely hoping that my professor never finds this blog. It would be easy to prove that I turned it in to him before I posted it here, but I'd still have to explain why I'm such a huge nerd.

Jurgen Habermas, in case I did not make this clear enough in my paper, wrote a book to explain why he thinks genetic modification of humans is wrong. Essentially, he believes that if babies' attributes are chosen--hair color, eye color, not at risk for childhood leukemia, you name it--then that child's free will has been taken away and ergo that child can never ever lead a moral life. I, er, take issue with this opinion here.

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Habermas’ use of Free Will in The Future of Human Nature

Within his work, The Future of Human Nature, Jurgen Habermas creates an argument for where we as a society might draw the line regarding our impending ability to manipulate the genes and phenotypes of potential humans. For Habermas, that line is governed by whether or not one preserves the autonomy of the potentially modified future humans. Habermas’ inclusion of autonomy is grounded in the work of Kierkegaard and it is strongly tied to Kierkegaard’s ideas about Free Will. However, Kierkegaard died roughly a century before modern neuroscience and psychology were able to bring in the relevant data. This forces us to ask whether the evidence that has been gathered from modern psychology regarding the concept of Free Will is in line with, or in contradiction to, Habermas’ usage.

For Habermas, the answer to the question of how to live an ethical life is derived from Kierkegaard, who he says answered the question, “with a postmetaphysical concept of ‘being-able-to-be-oneself.’” (Habermas, 2003, 5) Though there may be other concerns beyond ‘being-able-to-be-oneself,’ they cannot be considered if one, in the first place, does not have one’s autonomy. Habermas’ other main distinction, between things which are grown and things which are made, is related to this. For Habermas, things which are grown maintain their autonomy, whereas things which are made have no control over the determination of their lives and cannot be considered autonomous, nor by extension capable of living an ethical life. If a parent makes any changes to the natural process of infant development, then they would be taking away said autonomy and therefore condemning such children to be incapable of living ethical lives. When Habermas writes about autonomy or an ability to be oneself, he is writing about the ability to live one’s life free from determinism, capable of making decisions and taking action upon them without influence from outside factors. What he fails to acknowledge or even mention is that there has been considerable debate about such an ability, which calls into question one of the major premises from which he constructs his argument.

Before moving into scientific evidences for the nonexistence of Free Will, and given that Kierkegaard himself was a theist, it is helpful to look at the religious history of the debate regarding Free Will. St. Augustine fully developed the concept as we now understand it, largely as a solution to the problem of theodicy (Bargh, 2008). If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving, then one way to get him off-the-hook, so to speak, for all the evil in the world is to say that the existence of Free Will on the part of those to whom evil happens accounts for evil’s existence. In other words, that they deserve it. Not all Christian theologians have followed this line, however. After compiling the writings of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards, David G. Meyers (2008) notes that there are three mandatory limitations to Free Will within Christianity. Namely, it cannot violate God’s foreknowledge (i.e. nothing can be done without His implicit consent, ergo all Will is limited), it cannot violate God’s sovereignty, (i.e. Will cannot be Free because that implies that God’s plans are dependent upon our decisions), nor can it violate God’s grace (because every good we are capable of doing comes through God in the first place). Given these dilemmas, it is remarkable that the concept of Free Will has persisted among theists, and yet it has.

Having come far since its formal beginnings in the late 19^th century, Psychology is now in a position to comment empirically on the existence of many concepts from the Philosophy of Mind, including Free Will and Determinism. John Bargh (2008) wrote that what is truly surprising about the continuously deterministic findings of psychology is not that they seem to contradict Free Will, but “Instead, the surprise comes from the continuing overarching assumption of the field regarding the primacy of conscious will” (Bargh, 2008, 128). He notes that every other science takes a deterministic universe for granted and that psychologists often are surprised by deterministic results is embarrassing. He identifies three areas from which our actions are determined: Firstly, there are genetic determinants of behavior. Given the surety of evolution through natural selection, it would be absurd to assume that behavior is not also governed by genes. This connection is obvious in non-human animals, but its implications are being borne out in humans as well. Secondly, cultural determinants exist to guide us where genetic determinants would be too slow-acting to be beneficial. Thus aspects of our lives, such as language, are governed by the culture in which a child is raised rather than by a conscious will to learn to speak a specific language or to involve oneself in local customs. And finally, the sum of all experiences of a person’s life, that is, individual learning, adds an even finer level of constraints to what a person’s actions must be.

The most important research to date on Free Will seems to be Libet’s (1986) work on the neurophysiology of voluntary action. Libet set up three different timers which measured when a participant performed an action, when they chose to perform that action, and when their brains primed to perform that action. Libet found that his participants’ brains got ready to perform the assigned action between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds before they had the conscious experience of deciding to perform that action. The significance of this finding cannot be overstated. Half a second before anyone ever feels like having made a decision, that one’s brain has already made that decision on his behalf. With respect to our actions, it seems that our experience of Free Will is a latecomer.

Habermas’ argument, then, which is so firmly grounded on the autonomy of unborn children, loses its relevance entirely. Habermas’ main problem is that if a person were to determine in any way the genotype or phenotype of an unborn child, said adult would be condemning the child to a determined life, therefore a life in which the child cannot conform to Kierkegaard’s outdated notion of the good life. However, it has been made clear by empirical evidence that the child’s genotypes and phenotypes are determined regardless. Whether or not a child’s development is tampered-with makes no difference with respect to its own self-determination. Having removed the fallacious premise which supported Habermas’ conclusions, a new line must be drawn for the ethical dealings with proto-humans, a line which is consistent with modern data.

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Bargh, J. A. (2008). Free will is un-natural. In J. Baer, J Kaufman, & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Are we free? Psychology and free will (128-154). Oxford University Press.

Habermas, J. (2003). The future of human nature. Cambridge: Polity.

Libet, B. (1986). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 529-66.

Myers, D. C. (2008) Determined and Free. In J. Baer, J Kaufman, & R. Baumeister (Eds.), Are we free? Psychology and free will (32-43). Oxford University Press.