CapitalistImperialistPig

Patricia S. Churchland was on Stephen Colbert's show the other day, flogging her forthcoming book: Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves  .  Among other things, she told Stephen that his brain was rather like that of a mouse, and that he didn't have a soul.  I recall reading her book Neurophilosophy back when I was a student of artificial intelligence.  It had a nice discussion of the fundamentals or neuroscience, some confused thoughts on relativity, and the first use of the word "consilience" that I recall. She and her husband Paul Churchland are exponents of a school of philosophy called "eliminative materialism".   I have only a slight clue as to what that means, but I am generally sympathetic to the notion that our thoughts and behaviors have neural substrates.  They apparently go a bit further and argue that "folk psychology" with its theories of  mind, belief, and sensation is an obsolete theory about unreal objects, like the geocent...

I've been reading more of Christopher Boehm's books on hierarchy, egalitarianism, and the origins of our moral instincts (Hierarchy in the Forest and Moral Origins). It seems that the human race's political modes have followed a sort of U shaped trajectory. Our close ape relatives are all highly hierarchical, and quite likely we all had some sort of hierarchical society back before the divergence of our species. Modern human hunter-gatherer societies are the closest proxies we have for the way humans lived before the invention of agriculture, and it seems likely that for most of human history, or rather, the prehistory of our current species, we lived very much like them. These modern and recent counterparts seem invariably to be quite egalitarian in the sense that adult males of a band lack regular hierarchies. Since the delopment civilizations, however, we have all been stuck in relatively hierarchical societies. Even our most egalitarian democracies are pretty hier...

If you have been interested in the recent morality bloggin threads, you might be intered to know that Paul Bloom of Yale is offering a course next January through Coursera:  https://www.coursera.org/course/moralities It doesn't start till next year, but he does have a suggested reading list out already.  Not sure how he comes down vs. Boehm, but his list includes Pinker and Haidt.

In a sense, evolutionary psychology begins with a paradox, first recognized by Darwin. Darwin's theory of natural selection is, in essence, an extremely selfish theory. Any behavior that enhances the chances that someone else's genes will survive over yours will tend to be selected out. It's long been recognized that close relatives are a special case, so for purposes of this discussion we will restrict the word "altruism" to acts which enhance the fitness of an unrelated individual at some cost to one's own fitness. Risking one's life for a stranger is a classic if extreme case. In a sense, the central problem of evolutionary psychology is "How can altruism exist?" Of course this is only a problem for those who want scientific and naturalistic explanations. Religious hocus-pocus can find as many explanations as you like. There are plenty of clues around. For one thing, altruism is almost always restricted in scope. We are more generous t...

When I wrote about reading Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior , Lee mentioned that he had read his later book, Moral Origins:The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame . Well, I couldn't resist and now am reading it also. I have to say that Moral Origins is far more accessible in style, and that it is written with exceptional clarity and elegance. The issues and arguments (so far, I'm a slow reader) are very well presented, as are remaining controversies. Here is a sample I liked a lot: What Darwin did about this last problem was quite remarkable. He initiated the first systematic research across cultures by writing to colonial administrators and missionaries all over the world to ask them whether indigenous people in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere blushed with shame. Having one’s face “color” for social reasons is unique to humans, and Darwin was interested in knowing whether morally based, shameful blushing was merely som...

Probably every culture has had at least one theory of human nature, but lately two different and competing notions have dominated intellectual discussion. One, described by Stephen Pinker as the "Blank Slate" theory, holds that human nature is so plastic that behavior is specified almost entirely by culture. The principle alternative argues that much of our behavior derives from instincts that have served to promote our surval over the ages of our evolution. The blank slate notion is much beloved of Marxists and other utopians who think that all we need is the right instruction to produce the perfect human. The instinctive basis has ancient roots, but in it's modern incarnaion owes a lot to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, which attempt to trace characteristic behaviors to evolutionary advantage, often and controversially when such behaviors seem counterproductive in a modern society. In practice, almost nobody is a purist. Hardly anybody would deny an insti...

It's immoral to take money from those who earned it and give it to those who didn't. And It's immoral to adopt policies which impoverish your fellow citizens Most people, I guess, would subscribe to at least one of these, and many, like myself, would find that both resonate. In a sense, though, they are the opposite sides of the same argument. Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain find themselves in economic fixes that are at least partly of their own making. How much help, if any, does the rest of Europe owe them? Both statements, by the way, grow naturally out of fundamental aspects of human morality. Moral dilemmas grow out of conflicts between various aspects of our inherited moral principles. Ditto political conflicts, and at least some aspects of economic arguments. It's more complicated than that of course. If the European periphery implodes, there will likely be widespread damage to the rest of Europe and the rest of the World, so Germany and the rest arg...

One of the more surprising findings about political opinions found in Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: ...political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this: “In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?’ ”36 Haidt, Jonathan (2012-03-13). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (p. 86). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition. Perceived self interest seems to be less important than the interest of some group of which one is a member. This finding is a little less startling if you think of political opinions as badges of team membership - public postures, if you will.

Physics seems to be wandering off into domains where I can't follow, such as the pressing question of why there is something rather than nothing, while Lubos has become fascinated with fruit flies , so my interests have turned to morality and the question of how we come by our frequently conflicting moral views. This interest is prompted by Jonathan Haidt's new book: The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are divided by Politics and Religion . It's pretty easy to collect folk theories on the above topic. Liberals are immoral. Conservatives are unevolved, or maybe just dumb. These theories are not too enlightening. Haidt, however, takes a point of view that I find congenial: he studies the questions experimentally and systematically. In particular, he has looked in detail at moral views of peoples and cultures from all over, and experimentally probed how people make moral decisions. The methods are fascinating in themselves, as are the results. I am only about four chap...

Who is not a Slave? Cicero declared that any man who works for wages makes himself a slave. Certainly Walmart thinks so. By a slight extension, those who sell the product of their work are equally enslaved. A couple of thousand years later, libertarians discovered that anyone who paid taxes was a slave. Whom is left? Only rentiers - those who live solely by the labor of others - who don't pay taxes. Mitt Romney, for example. Given the above its not surprising that many of the rentier class worship at the libertarian altar. It's less clear why others do. Humans, as I keep saying, are social animals, and as such we live in a network of mutual obligations and duties. The tension between community and liberty is a dominant theme in human morality and all our moral dilemmas. Libertarians resolve that tension by rejecting community and making liberty the be all and end all. In doing so, I argue, they reject a fundamental component of human nature and expose themselves ...

I swiped the title from Steve Landsburg. He has an excellent post which, among other thing, outlines a clear alternative to the concept of the "local golden rule" I outlined in a previous post. I sometimes think that I probably really shouldn't have pissed him off so thoroughly - we could have had some good discussions, if we didn't kill each other first. Here he is on his moral conception: People are dying so that you can read this blog. Your internet access fees could more than double the income of a $400-a-year Ghanaian laborer. People are starving to death, and there you sit, with resources enough to save them (and with reputable charities standing by to effect the transfers), padding your own already luxuriant lifestyle. That’s a choice you made. It’s a choice almost everyone in the First World makes. It might or might not be a horrific choice, but it’s one for which we easily forgive each other. ... Someday you might find yourself strolling through a desert with...

Steve Landsburg has up what I like to think of an as answer to some of my critique of his post on economic efficiency. I don't want to deal with that now, though, because I got distracted by his Consequentialist theory of morality, which he calls the Economist's Golden Rule - see his book on the Big Questions . Briefly stated, he says an action is moral if it leaves the world a "better" place. You might not be too astonished to learn that often enough, this can be interpreted to mean that he who has the gold, rules. I have a visceral dislike of Consequentialist ethics, and as usual, Landsburg has a gift for stating, and endorsing one of its conclusions in the most offensive way possible. Suppose, says he - I'm working from memory here - that you are in control of a two position toggle switch. If left in the current state, you know that one billion people will get a brief, mild but painful headache. If you flip it, the one billion will be spared, but one in...