Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 117

Amazon Mechanical Turk Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

The online hell that is Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Why are some cities hotbeds of revolution?

Chuck Close is accused of harassment. Should his artwork be banned from museums, or carry a disclaimer?

Why we forget most of the books we read (and how to do something about it).

The shallowness of Google Translate, from the point of view of someone who knows a lot about both languages and machine learning.

_____

Please notice that the duration of the comments window is three days (including publication day), and that comments are moderated for relevance (to the post one is allegedly commenting on), redundancy (not good), and tone (constructive is what we aim for). This applies to both the suggested readings and the regular posts. Also, keep ‘em short, this is a comments section, not your own blog. Thanks!

Five big philosophical questions: my modest take

golden 3d number 5 isolated on white

An anonymous poster has recently published a short essay over at the Oxford University Press philosophy blog, entitled “5 great unsolved philosophical questions.” How could I possibly resist answering them, I ask you? Presumptuous, you might say. Well, no, that would be the case if I claimed that my answers are original, or clearly the right ones. I make no such claim, I am simply offering my informed opinion about them, in my dual role of a philosopher and scientist. Of course, I’m also totally right.

Before proceeding, I need to remind readers of my take on the nature of philosophical questions, and therefore of philosophy itself. Here it is, in a nutshell. (For a much longer, and far more substantiated, though of course not necessarily convincing to everyone, answer, see here.)

Philosophy began, in the Western tradition, with the pre-Socratics, and at that time, and for many centuries afterwards, its business was all-encompassing. Pretty much every meaningful question to be asked was philosophical, or had a philosophical component. Then gradually, mathematics was spun off as one of many offsprings from Mother Philosophy, followed from the 17th century on by a succession of what today we call sciences: first physics, then chemistry, biology, and eventually psychology. That did not mean any shrinking of philosophy itself, however. The discipline retained its core (metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, and so forth) and added just as many “philosophies of” as new disciplines originated from it (e.g., philosophy of science, of language, of mind, and so forth).

In modern times, I think the business of philosophy is no longer trying to attain empirical truths about the world (we’ve got science for that), but rather to critically explore concepts and notions informed, whenever possible, by science. As Wilfrid Sellars would put it, philosophers are in the business of reconciling the manifest and the scientific images of the world. (I also think philosophy is therapy for the sane, so to speak, and a way of life.)

As a result, and this brings me to the topic of the present post, philosophical questions are unlikely to ever be answered definitively. Rather, philosophers propose a number of competing accounts aimed at increasing our understanding of such questions. Our knowledge of things will likely always underdetermine our understanding, meaning that several accounts may be equally plausible or interesting. The job of philosophers is to propose and refine these accounts, as well as discard those that have become untenable because of our progress in both science and philosophy.

1. Do we really have free will?

An incredible amount of ink has been spilled on this question over the centuries. There are religious people from the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition who are absolutely sure the answer is yes. And there are physicists and neuroscientists who are adamant that the answer is obviously no.

My take is that it all depends on what one means by “free will,” and moreover, that the answer doesn’t really matter. If “free” indicates some magical independence of human will from causality, then no, we don’t have it. We are part and parcel of the universal web of cause and effect, and we can’t exempt ourselves simply so that we can reconcile the alleged existence of an all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing God with the obvious observation that bad shit happens in the world.

That said, people who are absolutely sure that we live in a deterministic universe, where the writing of these very words was a given ever since the Big Bang, are significantly overstepping their epistemic warrant. Physics has not given us, yet, an ultimate theory describing the basic building blocks of existence, and we don’t know whether the world, ato bottom, works deterministically or whether instead there is true randomness in it. Indeed, we are not even sure that so-called “strong emergence” is impossible, though at the moment I’m betting against it.

But, as I said, it doesn’t matter. We should drop the theologically loaded term “free will” to begin with, and go instead with what the ancient Greeks called prohairesis, and modern cognitive scientists call volition, the ability to make decisions. It is an indisputable fact that we have more volition than most animals, a hell of a lot more than plants, and infinitely more than rocks. It is also indisputable that we have to make decisions in order to live, that we can train ourselves to get better at them, and that it is in our own interest to do so. Anyone objecting to this is falling prey to the ancient “lazy argument,” and is just wasting your time.

2. Can we know anything at all?

Ah, well, that depends on what one means by “know,” doesn’t it? Setting aside modern debates in epistemology (the so-called Gettier problem), at a first approximation knowledge is, following Plato, justified true belief. So the debate is really about truth and justification.

There are different conceptions of truth, as I have argued at length (see here and here), so we need to be more specific. Science, and much everyday discourse, typically operate according to a correspondence theory of truth: it is true that the Moon rotates around the Earth just in case the state of affairs in the world out there corresponds with that sentence. Logic and mathematics, by contrast, work with a coherence conception of truth. To say that the Pythagorean theorem is “true” (yes, yes, within the framework of Euclidean geometry!) is to say that its conclusions are logically derived from its premises in a valid fashion.

But of course the correspondence account of truth brings up the issue of justification: how do we justify the correspondence between my utterance that the Moon goes around the Earth in terms of actual states of affairs in the world? Unlike in deductive reasoning, which is typical of both formal logic and mathematics, scientific and everyday inferences are inductive, which means we cannot be certain about them, we can only make probabilistic statements. So, in the strict sense, no, we can’t know anything (outside of logical-mathematical truths). But this isn’t worrisome so long as one is willing to accept with humility that human beings are finite and fallible. We still seem to have been able to acquire a lot of quasi-knowledge, which has been serving us well for hundreds of thousands of years.

(Notice that I completely ignored the radical skeptical challenge to the concept of knowledge, a la Pyrrhonism, or of the Cartesian doubt type. I think those challenges are both irrefutable and irrelevant, except as a good aid at checking our own hubris.)

3. Who am “I”?

This too is an age-old question, to which both scientists and philosophers have attempted to provide answers. Philosophers have come up with accounts based on the continuity of memory (what makes you who you are is your memories), on the persistence of one’s personality, or on the continued physical existence of you as a spatio-temporal being, and so on. All of these have problems, and yet all of them capture some aspects of what we think we mean when we use the word “I.” Other theories are deflationary, both in philosophy and in modern neuroscience. There really is no “you,” because your “self” is not an essence, it is, as David Hume famously put it, a bundle of perceptions.

I don’t subscribe to either the idea that there is an essence that is us (e.g., the position taken by anyone who believes we have souls), nor to the opposite notion that the self is an illusion. Personal identity is a human concept, not something to be discovered out there, either by metaphysical or scientific inquiry. It is the way we think about, and make sense of, our thoughts, sensations, and experiences. It is both true that I am, to an extent, a different person from what I was ten or twenty years ago, as well as that I am, to a point, the same (or similar enough) person. And yes, this way of thinking about personal identity is informed by a combination of the above criteria: I am who I am because I have memories of my past (in part, and anyway a disease could erase them), because I have a certain somewhat stable personality (though aspects of it have changed over time, and again a disease could alter it dramatically), and because I have been in existence as a continuous spatio-temporal “warm.”

It is true that we can come up with all sorts of clever thought experiments about unreal situations that effectively question every account proposed so far. But those thought experiments largely miss the point, because in a sense they assume that there is one true and final answer to the question of personal identity, if only we were clever enough to figure it out. That, I think, is a mistake that smells of Platonic Idealism, like asking what is the essence of the concept of chair and attempting to arrive at a definition that unifies all the objects that we label with that word, with no exceptions and no provisos.

4. What is death?

This is an easy one, as far as I’m concerned. Plenty of people seem to think that death is something mysterious, and wonder what will happen “after.” Nothing will happen, because you will have ceased to exist. Consequently, there will be no “you” (whatever that means, see above) to experience anything. There is nothing that it is like to be dead.

I arrived at this conclusion both because my philosophy is naturalistic, and because I’m a scientist, and particularly a biologist. My professor of biophysics in college, Mario Ageno, memorably defined death as a sudden increase in entropy, which disrupts the orderly functions of our our physiology and metabolism. Death is a natural phenomenon, everything passes, panta rhei. The important question, as the Stoics were keenly aware of, is what you are going to do between now and that final moment. And keep in mind that you don’t actually know when it will come. It may already be later than you think…

5. What would “global justice” look like?

This is an odd entry in the OUP Blog post, possibly a reflection of contemporary debates about justice and inequality, more than a measure of the fundamentality of the question from a philosophical perspective. Then again, Socrates did spend a lot of time inquiring into the nature of justice, so there it goes. (We get a full treatment of the subject by Socrates/Plato in the Republic.)

The OUP entry, curiously, says that “to this day, there is no universally accepted theory of justice.” But why would we expect there to be such a theory? Again, justice, like personal identity, is a human construct, not to be found “out there,” either metaphysically or scientifically. We need to have a conversation about what we want justice to mean, whether it is a worthy goal (I certainly think it is), and what are the best strategies to achieve it.

As a practicing Stoic, I quite like that philosophy’s take on the concept, which was crucial to the Stoics since justice is one of the four virtues one is supposed to practice in order to become a better human being: “The unanimity of the soul with itself, and the good discipline of the parts of the soul with respect to each other and concerning each other; the state that distributes to each person according to what is deserved; the state on account of which its possessor chooses what appears to him to be just; the state underlying a law-abiding way of life; social equality; the state of obedience to the laws.” (Incidentally, this comes from Plato’s philosophical dictionary, the Definitions.)

There is a lot going on there, and please don’t be bothered by the use of the word “soul,” which can simply be replaced with mind, if you prefer. And I discard the bit about obedience to the laws, since there can obviously be unjust laws (that part is Platonic, not Stoic). The bulk of it, however, shifts back and forth between justice as personal attitude (we are in harmony with ourselves, we make the right decisions) and a social perspective (we want each person to receive according to their desert, we wish to achieve social equality). This capture an aspect often missing from modern discussions of justice: we cannot have a just society made of unjust people. Justice is achieved through a continuous virtuous feedback loop between individuals and the society they help constitute.

That’s it folks! I have just solved five of the all-time philosophical questions! You can thank me by buying me a drink the next time you see me…

Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 116

no iPhone Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

Do you really believe X? If so, take the Truth-Demon test. (Or, better yet, tell me how much money you are willing to bet on the truth of X.)

P.K. Dick, not Orwell or Huxley, predicted the world we live in.

More reasons to think the multiverse hypothesis isn’t good science. (see also my recent post here).

Psychologists surveyed hundreds of alt-right supporters. The results are as scary as shit.

Why so many Americans think Buddhism is “just” a philosophy.

An argument for not buying a cellphone. Which I read on, and tweeted about, from my iPhone.

The new “Cosmos” and the debate about the historical and scientific role of Giordano Bruno.

_____

Book Club: Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, 5, the evolution of language

Why is it that only the species Homo sapiens has evolved language? Well, aside, possibly, for other, now extinct, species of our own genus. Despite much talk of animal communication, that’s just what other species do: communicate. Language is a very special, and highly sophisticated, type of communication. Characterized by grammar, capable of recursivity, inherently open ended. Nothing like that exists anywhere else in the animal world. Why?

That’s the topic of the eight chapter of Kevin Laland’s Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind, which we are in the midst of discussing. A major problem here, as Laland points out, is not that we have no idea of the possible answer, but rather that there are too many explanations on offer, none of which seems to quite do the job. Here is a partial list. Language evolved:

To facilitate cooperative hunting.
As a costly ornament allowing females to assess male quality.
As a substitute for the grooming exhibited by other primate species.
To promote pair bonding.
To aid mother-child communication.
To gossip about others.
To expedite tool making.
As a tool for thought.

And of course it’s very possible that language evolved to fulfill more than one, or even all of those functions! The stumbling block isn’t the imagination of researchers, but rather the dearth of relevant empirical evidence (something, of course, that isn’t the case only in some areas of evolutionary biology).

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that the evolution of language was a singular event, which precludes the use of one of evolutionary biology’s standard tools of investigation, the comparative phylogenetic method. Moreover, languages don’t leave much of a fossil record, thus taking out a second major tool from the biologist’s box.

Kevin proceeds by listing six criteria (and adding a seventh of his own) that a successful theory of language’s origin should meet in order to be further considered (I refer the reader to the chapter itself for more in-depth explanations concerning each criterion):

The theory must account for the honesty of early language. (If words are easy and cost-free, why should anyone believe what others say?)
The theory should account for the cooperativeness of early language. (Why should people, early on, have gone out of their way to help others by passing to them valuable information?)
The theory should explain how language was adaptive from the onset. (As it is hard to imagine how it could have been a spandrel.)
The concepts proposed by the theory should be grounded in reality. (That is, how did words acquire meaning in the first place?)
The theory should explain the generality of language. (As opposed to the specificity characteristic of every other animal communication system.)
The theory should account for the uniqueness of human language. (Why us and not anyone else?)
The theory should explain why communication needed to be learned. (Why is it that language needed to be socially learned and capable of changing rapidly?)

Laland then concludes that no theory suggested so far meets all seven of these criteria, and I think he’s right. His preferred answer should, at this point in our discussion of the book, come as no surprise:

“[This] raises the question of why humans alone should exhibit a culture that ratchets up in complexity. Theoretical studies answer this question by showing that high-fidelity information transmission is necessary for cumulative culture, but then pose the supplementary question of how our ancestors achieved high-fidelity transmission. The obvious answer is through teaching.” (p. 183)

Kevin then proceeds in orderly fashion by comparing his preferred hypothesis — that language evolved in order to teach relatives — to the seven criteria just listed, finding that the language-to-teach scenario satisfies all of them.

At this point it will be good to step back for a second. To begin with, I’m sure that other students of the evolution of language will dispute both of Laland’s claims: (i) that no other hypothesis is a good fit for all seven criteria, and (ii) that only the language-to-teach hypothesis does a good job with the same criteria. Or perhaps (iii) someone will question the adequacy or necessity of one or more of the criteria in the first place.

For me, though, what makes this chapter the least convincing of those we have read so far is that even if we grant Kevin everything he is arguing for, we are still left, at best, with an hypothetical scenario that falls far short of empirical verification. Yes, maybe language evolved so that we could efficiently teach valuable information to our relatives, and things then went on from there. Or maybe there is a clever variant of one of the other hypotheses now on the table that will be even more convincing than the present analysis. Or perhaps there is yet another scenario that simply nobody has thought up yet. We just don’t know. And to be honest I don’t think we are likely to know any time soon, if ever. Precisely because of a major stumbling block acknowledged by Laland himself: the evolution of language was a unique historical event, and unique historical events are exceedingly difficult (though not impossible) to study.

While reading the chapter, I was reminded of some sharp, and I’m sure very much unwelcome words written by one of my scientific role models, the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. In a book chapter entitled “The evolution of cognition: questions we will never answer,” he presents a critical analysis of the literature on the topic, making an argument that builds up to the following conclusion:

“I must say that the best lesson our readers can learn is to give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood. History, and evolution is a form of history, [often] simply does not leave sufficient traces. … Form and even behavior may leave fossil remains, but forces like natural selection do not. It might be interesting to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.” (p. 130)

Seems to me that one could easily replace “cognition” with “language” and still be largely in the right. I’m sure Kevin will disagree, and I look forward to his comments.

_____

(Note to the reader: this commentary covers that major part of chapter 8, devoted to the question of the original function of language. The latter part of the chapter addresses a different, if related, question: how was it computationally possible for hominins to learn language, regardless of which selective pressured favored it? While interesting, I elected not to cover this bit, in order to focus discussion on what I think are the more crucial points of the chapter.)

Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 115

Jews and jokes Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

Jews and their jokes, a natural history.

The problem with self-help, philosophically speaking.

Does philosophy make progress? Yes. No. (And a different answer here.)

An Ancient Greek idea could have foiled Brexit’s democratic tragedy. And maybe even Trumpism.

Welcome to the democracy-poisoning golden age of free speech.

_____

Peter Woit vs Sean Carroll: string theory, the multiverse, and Popperazism

Peter Woit (left) vs Sean Carroll (right)

The string and multiverse wars are going strong in fundamental physics! And philosophy of science is very much at the center of the storm. I am no physicist, not even a philosopher of physics, in fact (my specialty is evolutionary biology), so I will not comment on the science itself. I take it that the protagonists of this diatribe are more than competent enough to know what they are talking about. But they keep bringing in Karl Popper and his ideas on the nature of science, as well as invoke — or criticize — Richard Dawid’s concept of non-empirical theory confirmation, so I feel a bit of a modest commentary as a philosopher of science is not entirely out of order.

Let me begin with two caveats: first, there are many people involved in the controversy, including Sean Carroll, Peter Woit, Sabine Hossenfelder, George Ellis, and Joe Silk (not to mention astute commentators such as Lee Smolin and Jim Baggott). Refreshingly, almost all of them have respect for philosophy of science, unlike ignorant (of philosophy) physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking. So, who knows, some of them may even read the following with some interest. Second, I actually know most of these people, obviously some better than others. I like and respect them all, even though — as we shall see — in this post I will come squarely down on one side rather than the other.

And what are these sides? For this round, I’ll focus on an exchange between Sean Carroll and Peter Woit on the specific issue of multiverse theory, though the two disagree — for the same reasons — also about the status of string theory. I have published an extended commentary on the string wars at Aeon magazine, after having participated to a conference organized by Dawid, where Peter, unfortunately, had not been invited, and which Sean, equally unfortunately, couldn’t attend.

Sean has recently written a post at Preposterous Universe entitled “Beyond falsifiability,” in which he summarizes a paper of his, currently at arxiv.org: Beyond falsifiability: normal science in a multiverse. Here is the abstract of that paper:

“Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse — a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us — are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn’t play a crucial role in legitimate scientific theories. I argue that the way we evaluate multiverse models is precisely the same as the way we evaluate any other models, on the basis of abduction, Bayesian inference, and empirical success. There is no scientifically respectable way to do cosmology without taking into account different possibilities for what the universe might be like outside our horizon. Multiverse theories are utterly conventionally scientific, even if evaluating them can be difficult in practice.”

Not so fast, replies Peter at his blog, Not Even Wrong: “Much of the problem with the paper and blog post is that Carroll is arguing against a straw man, while ignoring the serious arguments about the problems with multiverse research. … None of those references [in the paper] contain anything like the naive argument that if we can’t observe something, it ‘simply shouldn’t matter,’ or one should not speculate about it, or it ‘shouldn’t count as science at all.’”

A good part of the discussion hinges on Sean accusing critics of both string theory and the multiverse of “Popperazism,” a neologism coined by him (as far as I can tell), which refers to the alleged misappropriation of the ideas of influential philosopher of science Karl Popper. Indeed, Sean already wrote a short piece for Edge back in 2014 in response to the question: “What scientific theory is ready for retirement?” His answer: falsificationism, the notion, proposed by Popper, that what demarcates science from non-science (and pseudoscience) is the feasibility of falsifying the tenets of a given theory or hypothesis. If a theory is in principle falsifiable, argued Popper, then it is scientific. If there is no way to subject it to the falsifiability criterion, it isn’t science.

Setting aside that falsificationism is not a scientific theory, but rather a notion in philosophy of science (after all, how would you falsify Popper’s account?), Sean admits that he hasn’t gone over the nuances of what Popper actually wrote. That’s unfortunate, because Popper was a bit more of a sophisticated philosopher than he is usually given credit for. Even though his ideas are no longer current in philosophy of science (you know, philosophy does make progress!), if one invokes him to dismiss a scientific theory (as Ellis and Silk do), or, conversely, rejects his insight in order to deflect criticism against one’s favorite theory (as Sean does), it would be good to take a look at what the men actually wrote.

Without going into too much detail (for an in-depth discussion and pertinent quotes see my Aeon article mentioned above), Popper realized that falsification is not a sharp blade capable of neatly cutting off science front non-science. He was also aware of, and discussed at length, the fact that legitimate scientific theories do include ad hoc explanations that are used by scientists as place holders until (and if) they figure out what is wrong with the theory they are working on. Nobody has ever rejected a scientific theory because all its statements were not immediately falsifiable, nor did Popper suggest such a crude practice in the first place.

To be fair to Sean, he says that what he is after is the naive version of Popper that he thinks others are using as a blunt instrument to dismiss string theory and the multiverse as outright unscientific. But, as Peter points out, evidence of such extreme “Popperazism” is hard to come by. Here, for instance, is the above mention George Ellis, in a response to a critique by Daniel Harlow, which Sean quotes approvingly:

“The process of science — exploring cosmology options, including the possible existence or not of a multiverse — is indeed what should happen. The scientific result is that there is no unique observable output predicted in multiverse proposals. This is because, as is often stated by proponents, anything that can happen does happen in most multiverses. Having reached this point, one has to step back and consider the scientific status of claims for their existence. The process of science must include this evaluation as well.”

Peter comments: “The problem with the multiverse is that it’s an empty idea, predicting nothing. It is functioning not as what we would like from science, a testable explanation, but as an untestable excuse for not being able to predict anything. In defense of empty multiverse theorizing, Carroll wants to downplay the role of any conventional testability criterion in our understanding of what is science and what isn’t.”

Does Sean do that? It appears so when he says: “The best reason for classifying the multiverse as a straightforwardly scientific theory is that we don’t have any choice. This is the case for any hypothesis that satisfies two criteria: (i) It might be true; (ii) Whether or not it is true affects how we understand what we observe.”

Those are exceedingly weak criteria indeed. As an extreme example, take the very fuzzy notion of God: it might be true, and whether it’s true or not this would affect how we understand the world. So what? Neither of those two observations — in itself — provides an iota of reason to believe in God. Or the multiverse.

Sean then moves to another target critics of string theory and the multiverse often aim at: Richard Dawid’s notion, mentioned above, of a new science based on what he calls “non-empirical confirmation.” As Sean acknowledges, that term was probably really bad PR on the part of Dawid:

“It sounds like Dawid is saying that we can confirm theories (in the sense of demonstrating that they are true) without using any empirical data, but he’s not saying that at all. Philosophers use ‘confirmation’ in a much weaker sense than that of ordinary language, to refer to any considerations that could increase our credence in a theory. Of course there are some non-empirical ways that our credence in a theory could change; we could suddenly realize that it explains more than we expected, for example. But we can’t simply declare a theory to be ‘correct’ on such grounds, nor was Dawid suggesting that we could.”

Hmm, as a philosopher, I don’t actually subscribe to this notion that we use “confirmation” in a weak sense at all. Still, Sean is right that we may, in the course of exploring the logical entailments of a given theory, discover that it has many more than we at first thought. Indeed, this is precisely what happened during the early history of string theory, and why it has attracted so much attention for so long. As for Dawid’s not suggesting that a theory should be declared correct on just such grounds, this is true. But it is also true that the whole point of Dawid’s Bayesian-informed approach is to make the argument that our belief in a theory should be updated, and even tilted toward provisional acceptance, on the basis of non-empirical entailments. This is controversial to say the least, both among philosophers and among scientists.

Sean continues: “Nobody is trying to change the rules of science; we are just trying to state them accurately. The multiverse is scientific in an utterly boring, conventional way: it makes definite statements about how things are, it has explanatory power for phenomena we do observe empirically, and our credence in it can go up or down on the basis of both observations and improvements in our theoretical understanding. Most importantly, it might be true, even if it might be difficult to ever decide with high confidence whether it is or not.”

There is a lot to unpack in those sentences. Beginning with the end, again, yes, multiverse theory may be true, but if we will never be able to decide that on the basis of empirical observation it simply shouldn’t count as a scientific theory. Nor should it be considered “probably” true, pace Dawid’s Bayesian approach. Indeed, at the moment, at least, the notion of a multiverse should be classed as scientifically-informed metaphysics. Too bad that so many scientists recoil from the “m-word,” though.

In terms of not trying to change the rules of science, I beg to differ. Maybe Sean isn’t, but Dawid definitely is. That’s a major point of his book on the subject. The question is whether such change is warranted or not. (I don’t think so.)

Moreover, there seems to me — as a naive external observer to the debate — to be nothing “boring” or “conventional” about the multiverse. It is, rather, a radical theory that would dramatically revise our whole conception of what a “universe” is in the first place!

Here Woit again makes some sharp comments: “[What] Carroll ignores is that the evaluation problem is not just ‘hard,’ but actually impossible, and if one looks into the reason for this, one finds that it’s because his term ‘the theory’ has no fixed reference. What ‘theory’ is he talking about? One sort of ‘theory’ he discusses are eternal inflation models of a multiverse in which you will have bubble collisions. Some such models predict observable effects in the CMB [cosmic background radiation]. Those are perfectly scientific and easy to evaluate, just wrong (since we see no such thing). Other such models predict no observable effect, those are untestable. ‘Hardness’ has nothing to do with it, the fact that there is some narrow range of models where tests are in principle possible but hard to do is true but irrelevant.”

Here we get pretty close to the edge of my competence, and I am going to leave it to Sean, Peter and the rest to evaluate what actual (novel) predictions multiverse theory makes, and whether and how they might be tested. But the more time passes (and this goes for string theory as well), the more the burden of proof rests on defenders of the theory, while the skeptics are increasingly justified in their impatience regarding the current dearth of such tests.

Sean concludes his post by writing that “understanding how science progresses is an interesting and difficult question, and should not be reduced to brandishing bumper-sticker mottos to attack theoretical approaches to which we are not personally sympathetic.”

That is most certainly true, though again I see little evidence of bumper-sticker brandishing. But it is curious to me that he seems to imply that his critics attack string theory and the multiverse because they are not “personally sympathetic” to those notions — not because they honestly see intellectual problems with them. This comes close to poisoning the well, a type of elementary logical fallacy that Sean is usually too careful a thinker to indulge in. Besides, what makes him so confident that he and other defenders of strings and multiverse aren’t just as much personally invested in those notions, and hence subject to more or less unconscious biases? As Caroll Tavris and Elliot Ar0nson memorably put it, “mistakes were made, but not my me.”

_____

Postscript: the term “Popperazzi” appears to have been used first by Leonard Susskind, at least since his 2006 “The Cosmic Landscape,” p. 192 (with thanks to various commenters on Twitter, especially Jim Baggott).

Also, entirely coincidentally, Sabine Hossenfelder has a (critical) piece on the multiverse at NPR.org.

Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 114

Fire and Fury Trump Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

Sometimes I believe in string theory. Then I wake up.

Tom Brady is drowning in his own pseudoscience. But he’s selling it to you at very steep prices.

The problem with naturopathic pseudoscience.

Publicly we say me too, but privately we have misgivings, say a number of feminists.

Fire and Fury is the perfectly postmodern book for a postmodern Presidency.

Computers are making generalists of us all. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Turns out, there is more than some reasonable doubt about the idea of a backfire effect and other recent “discoveries” of social psychology. Not all is lost for reason and evidence.

Improving ourselves to death.

_____

Conversations with Dan: eudaimonia, Stoicism, and “the good life”

Monty Python Meaning of Life What does it mean to live the good life? I’m positive Donald Trump, or Jeff Bezos, would give you very different answers from the one you’d get from me. But they are wrong and I’m right. After all, they are just rich and powerful people, I’m a philosopher…

Okay, kidding aside, “what is the meaning of life?” is the quintessential philosophical question, though one that these days is more likely to be satisfactorily answered by Monty Python than in the halls of a philosophy department (please make sure you get to the very end of the song). That is part of the reason why my friend Dan Kaufman and I do our occasional Sophia video series. The latest installment takes the question on directly by exploring the various meanings of the Ancient Greek word eudaimonia, often translated into English as happiness (which is not, really), or flourishing (close, but not quite). Modern psychologists have apparently given up translating it altogether, using eudaimonia to mean a generally positive and meaningful life.

Dan and I figured that different Hellenistic schools of philosophy could actually be classified according to their own conception of eudaimonia, which in turn informed their specific recipes for the life worth living (see diagram in this post). Our discussion proceeds with an inquiry into who can really claim to have lived a satisfying life, and according to which criteria. We then move to consider the influence the Stoics had on Kant, particularly his emphasis on duty (as distinct from, say, the influence that the Epicureans had on John Stuart Mill, leading him to make his famous distinction between low and high pleasures — in which he compares a satisfied pig with a dissatisfied Socrates).

Dan considers himself a neo-Aristotelian, so we had a lively back and forth about whether a life worth living can be one deprived of external goods, so long as one does the right thing regardless of circumstances (as the Stoics maintained), or whether some external goods are necessary (as Aristotle thought). It will be crystal clear, and hopefully informative, on which side each of us comes down and why.

We then finish with an examination of the extent to which building moral character requires interaction with society (here the Stoics and Aristotelians actually agreed, though with different emphases), and ask ourselves whether modern philosophy is going “corporate” and whether that’s a good thing (the short answers: unfortunately yes, absolutely not). Here is the full video:

Plato’s reading suggestions, episode 113

Roman style orgy Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

Why Oprah for President is a terrible idea. Version 1.

Why Oprah for President is a terrible idea. Version 2.

A perfect example of very clever, and so far as I can tell, totally irrelevant, philosophy.

Want to be happy? Think like an old person.

Sex parties of the tech and famous. Why Silicon Valley is very much a culture of women exploitation.

Silicon Valley’s preoccupation with AI destroying the world is a reflection of their own libertarian-informed predatory attitude.

The problem with “problematic” and the bizarre notion of subjecting unpublished novels to “sensitivity reads.”

_____

The (process) metaphysics of evolution

Heraclitus, by Hendrick ter Brugghen

Metaphysics isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when someone is thinking about the theory of evolution, especially if that someone is an evolutionary biologist who is reasonably skeptical of any metaphysical claim — like yours truly.

Nonetheless, my Exeter University colleague John Dupré has published a stimulating paper that seeks to apply so-called process metaphysics to modern debates in evolutionary biology (full paper here). The result is intriguing, though that doesn’t mean I’m completely on board with what John writes.

Let’s start with the basics. Dupré defines metaphysics as the branch of philosophy that aspires to provide the most general description of reality. You would think that nowadays that aspiration falls squarely within fundamental physics, except for the fact that fundamental physics — as interesting as it is — is largely irrelevant to most of the other sciences, and “the most general description of reality” can’t be just the description of whatever is at the bottom of reality.

John also argues, and I think he is completely right about it, that:

“Though they may sincerely deny it, scientists are almost inevitably committed to metaphysical opinions. … Metaphysics can be ignored but not escaped.”

If that’s true, then we (philosophers) better get our metaphysics straight, and we (biologist) better pay attention to the consequences of our own assumptions on the matter, regardless of whether these assumptions are explicitly stated or not (in fact, particularly if they are not explicitly stated).

The way Dupré goes about this is by applying some philosophical reflection to the scientific work done by biologists, to see if certain metaphysical commitments made by scientists don’t turn out to be incorrect in the light of the scientists’ own work. Specifically, in this paper he explores a very old question in metaphysics: whether the world is composed of things or processes. The first position goes back at least to the Ancient Greek atomists, like Leucippus and Democritus (or, in India, the Jain, Ajivika and Carvaka schools, possibly dating back to the 4th century BCE). The second position was espoused by Heraclitus, and made famous by the Latin version of his dictum, panta rhei, “everything flows.” Nowadays, they are known in philosophy respectively as substance and process metaphysics.

Substance metaphysics implies an ontology of things (as opposed to an ontology of processes), and it has been dominant since the beginning of the scientific revolution in the 17th century. It is connected to the mechanicist approach, where everything is made of things with particular functions, and those things constitute the mechanisms that explain how the world works. Mechanicism in turn implies reductionism: things are made more and more complex from the bottom up, and the causal story is unidirectional.

Contrast this with the more fluid (ah!) process ontology, which rejects both mechanicism and reductionism: what maintains patterns of stability in the world isn’t just the behavior of individual entities, but also the network of relations among patterns and between patterns and the environment in which they are situated. I must confess that I started out, decades ago, as a mechanicist who believed in an ontology of things, just like most scientists do (especially physicists). But it was my own scientific research in evolutionary biology (particularly writing this book) that gradually interested me more and more in an ontology of processes and a less reductionist view of things. Only I didn’t know (until I turned professionally to philosophy) that this was called process ontology, and that it was a well worked out position among metaphysicians.

In his essay, Dupré applies this debate to the nature of biological species (see this paper of mine) and to our conception of evolutionary processes in general. As he clarifies, of course substance ontologists recognize that evolution is a process, but they think it is made possible by the more fundamental existence of things. For process ontologists, by contrast, everything — including living organisms — is a process. There is nothing stable. Panta rhei.

John explains very nicely the contrast between substance and process ontology. Consider the difference between a mountain and a storm. For a substance ontologist, the first one is a stable object, the second a process. But the process ontologist sees both as processes, only at very different time scales: the mountain changes continuously, but it takes millions of years for the change to be noticeable by the human eye. The storm also changes, obviously, but much more rapidly.

Then again, some storms are remarkably persistent, though in a dynamic fashion. Think of the famous Red Spot on Jupiter, which has been observed now for hundreds of years. Process ontologists think that a dynamic storm is a better paradigm for living organisms than a mountain. After all, when living beings achieve a stationary state we call them dead. As my professor of biophysics back in college, Mario Ageno (a student of Fermi, article in Italian), used to say: death is a sudden increase in entropy.

Why does it matter to think of organisms as processes rather than things? Dupré Suggests two reasons:

“The first is that it motivates a significant shift in emphasis with respect to what stands in need of explanation. The traditional concern for thing-centred ontology is change. I do not expect an explanation of why my desk is very much as I left it when I was last in my office. For a process, on the other hand, persistence requires explanation. Physiology is largely concerned with understanding the multitude of internal processes that enable an organism to stay alive, to maintain its thermodynamic disequilibrium with its environment. … The second reason why the processual status of organisms is important is that it places in the proper perspective the search for mechanistic explanation that is often alleged to be central to the contemporary life sciences. I take a mechanistic explanation to be, very roughly, one that involves identifying a set of constituents of a phenomenon and showing how their actions and interactions combine to generate the phenomenon. There is no doubt that this has been an enormously productive scientific strategy. Nonetheless, from a process perspective the mechanisms postulated by such explanations must always be abstractions from the wider biological context, and this always poses potential limits on their application.”

As a result, the organism should be seen not as a set of interlocking things (cells, sub-cellular components, individual molecules), but as a hierarchy of processes acting at different levels (molecular, physiological, and so forth).

If all of this sounds a bit abstract, that’s okay, it’s metaphysics, after all. To make things more concrete, John goes through a fairly in-depth analysis of the question of what evolves, i.e., what is the unit of evolution, in the process making some important clarifications on the nature of biological species.

It is an accepted truism in biology that individuals do not evolve, populations do. Then again, what counts as an individual? This is a very broad, and controversial question, but let’s focus on just one aspect of it: are species themselves “kinds” or individuals? Most biologists, I’m guessing, would answer that of course species are kinds, meaning categories to which a number of individual things belong, if these things satisfy certain criteria. For instance, Homo sapiens is a kind, to which all organisms that are statistically characterized by a certain type of genome, certain physiological, anatomical, developmental, and even cultural attributes, belong. Pan troglodites, a species of chimpanzee, is an evolutionarily related kind, to which all organisms satisfying certain other characteristics belong. And so forth.

However, most philosophers of biology accept some classical arguments put forth by Michael Ghiselin and David Hull, according to which species are not kinds, but rather individuals. If one accepts modern cladistic systematics, species are individuals identified by branches on a phylogenetic tree. This possibility was actually first brought up by a paleontologist, Steven Stanley, in a paper entitled “A theory of evolution above the species level” (pdf here).

Dupré accepts Ghiselin and Hull’s account, with some provisos inspired by his endorsement of process ontology. The most important of these provisos is that a branch of a phylogenetic tree is, of course, a process, not a thing. This neatly resolves a long standing problem for the species-as-individuals view: species change over time, but we said above that individuals do not evolve, populations do, so what gives? The answer is that species are individuals in the same sense that organisms are, even though organisms develop and change in the course of their short lifetime, while species change over longer evolutionary times. In both cases, we are talking about dynamic processes, not static things. That also explains why species typically have fuzzy boundaries: do you expect a thunderstorm to have a sharp and neat boundary, an exact point beyond which it is no longer a storm?

It is important to note, as John does in his paper, that not all processes generate individuals. Geological erosion is a process, but it doesn’t turn up anything like biological species. In order to do that, one needs a stabilizing process. In biology a major, though not the only, stabilizing process is natural selection, which tends to keep variants that are (locally, both spatially and temporally) sufficiently suited to the environment.

One consequence of this view of species as organisms that result from the stabilization of processes is that for most of the evolution of life on Earth there were no such thing as species-as-individuals. Bacteria are not stabilized in the required fashion, because their lineages do not actually identify species at all. And they don’t because they lack sexual reproduction, another major source of stabilization in multicellular species. John sees, correctly I think, the emergence of sex as making possible the emergence of species as individuals.

There is a lot more in the paper, where the author touches on a panoply of fascinating ideas in modern biology, from niche construction to epigenetic inheritance, from parental care to the evolution of culture. John’s treatment of the subject has wide ranging consequences, as he summarizes near the end of the paper:

“If species are what evolve, we should not, for this reason, expect quite general accounts of evolution. The Modern Synthesis [i.e., the increasingly less dominant standard model in biology], specifically, may be more or less true for some kinds of species, but quite inadequate for others. If species have evolved new forms of evolvability [because of the invention of sex], this is surely to be expected. Evolvability of many populations may just be a summative property of organism properties, but as species become integrated processes it is plausible that evolvability might emerge as a specific capacity of lineages.”

Evolutionary mechanisms themselves, in other words, evolve. And they do so because everything in biology is a process, not a thing.