// survival/machine

The seventeenth century was a time of great advances in thought, as well as a time of great fear caused by ideological conflict. Thomas Hobbes lived through the English Civil War, but he somehow managed to avoid offending either side too much, because he didn’t get into much trouble. Perhaps it was the violence he witnessed and the fear he experienced during the Civil War that convinced him of the necessity of strong government. Without it, he thought, human life would revert to a disorganized, violent and terrorized “state of nature” – a “war of all against all” in which the life of Man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

If Hobbes had had the benefit of living after Darwin, I think he might have revised that a bit. Humans are naturally gregarious – in other words, tribal – so the “state of nature” that Hobbes feared would probably have looked more like the situation described in The Lord of the Flies. Far from being naturally solitary, humans naturally form themselves into groups of like-minded individuals. So it wouldn’t be a “war of all against all” so much as a war of the majority against the weakest individuals.

When people form themselves into groups like that, not only do they promote their own interests more effectively, they also stifle the opposition more effectively. Usually, this means stifling the opposition’s point of view as well as preventing their competing interests from getting the upper hand.

I suppose there is no way to avoid interests coming into conflict, but I think we can re-educate ourselves to see that an opinion opposed to our own is something valuable to be welcomed, rather than something hateful to be stifled. An opinion is a mere belief. It is not itself a determination to promote a particular goal, although a belief often indicates the presence of such a determination. For example, people who think the Holocaust never happened are usually people who approve of the extermination of Jews, and may indeed be prepared to lend a hand to such evil. But I don’t think we should let our perfectly justified loathing of wicked acts spill over into the urge to stifle the expression of mistaken ideas.

Hobbes was not himself a scientist, but he greatly admired the new science that was emerging during his lifetime. He knew that its lifeblood was disagreement, and that it only thrived where free and fearless expression of opposed opinions was allowed. He was a friend of William Harvey (who discovered the circulation of the blood) and a correspondent of Descartes (who was arguably a better scientist than a philosopher). He was a likeable and funny man who wrote his first serious works when he was in his fifties. By the time he died in his nineties, he had written at least one masterpiece, Leviathan, whose first half is every bit as amusing as it is passionate and impolite. (No one living has actually read the second half, as far as I know.)

Hobbes was one of the first philosophers to recognize that we are easily duped by language that doesn’t make sense. Much of the passion of Leviathan expresses his rage at lack of clarity in language. If we allow ourselves to fall for what he called “insignificant speech” (i.e. meaningless talk), our thoughts will be unclear. Since we are by nature a cruel and vicious animal, lack of clarity in thought inevitably leads us to abandon critical reflection – and revert to our natural, uncivilized state of cruelty and viciousness.

Putting my own spin on it, we tend to get “fired up” on unclear language rather as we get intoxicated by alcohol. But as human beings, we are all “bad drunks”. So let’s try to be abstemious and insist on clarity.

Hobbes recognized that people often make ringing pronouncements that sound very grand and noble even though they are in fact literally nonsensical. The grandness and apparent nobility of these pronouncements takes the listener in, but they remain meaningless, even if the listener isn’t aware of their meaninglessness.

For example, about a century after Hobbes, Rousseau wrote that “Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.” We can all get the metaphor about being “in chains”, but what can it mean to say that Man is “born free”? – Human infants are surely as far from being free as any humans can be. Rousseau’s understanding of freedom differs from the most obvious one, which assumes that to be free is to be able to do what you want. For Rousseau, freedom isn’t doing what you want to do, but wanting what you ought to want. In saying that Man is “born free”, perhaps Rousseau was trying to express (or disguise) another idea: that society corrupts? Or perhaps he was trying to express an “ought” of some sort: that humans deserve freedom as a birthright? I won’t bother speculating any further about what Rousseau meant to say. If he meant to say it clearly, he could have said it clearly. But he didn’t. He said it “ringingly” instead.

Hobbes died before Rousseau was born, and Rousseau probably never bothered to read Hobbes, so their ideas never came into direct conflict. However, the tension between their respective ways of thinking (and writing) goes very deep. In the middle of the last century, philosophers used to be very rude to each other when they found themselves on either side of this divide. Continental European philosophers thought of Anglo-Saxon philosophers as shallow technicians, and for their part Anglo-Saxon philosophers thought of Continental philosophers as pretentious mystics.

Later, most of the academics got polite, and as they got more polite they got more earnest. Politeness and earnestness are currently the two ubiquitous vices of academic life. But I miss the good old days. I miss the filth and the fury, and the irony. But above all, I miss the intolerance of lack of clarity. I’m a follower of Hobbes who can’t abide nonsense. Furthermore, I think there’s something unutterably boring about pretentious, unclear language: it’s nearly always a veneer to disguise a simple lack of ideas.

Hobbes hated lack of clarity, and the hypocrisy of euphemisms. I think he would have approved of the insights expressed in The Lord of the Flies, because he had no illusions about the “innocence of children” or “natural goodness”. Later, Darwin wrote: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!” In a Hobbesian state of nature the life of Man would be communal, poor, nasty, brutish, and dull.

What’s wrong with gladiatorial contests? I’m talking about any sort of situation in which a thousand people (say) get some entertainment at the cost of one person’s life.

Most of us have the intuition that the right to life and the right to autonomy – to retain control over your own life – trump any “right to be entertained”. So even if there were a million spectators, or a billion spectators, their collective entertainment could never “outweigh” the victim’s moral entitlement to live unmolested.

I think that intuition is about right (i.e. roughly correct; ‘right’ = adjective). However, I don’t like the way it refers to moral rights (’rights’ = noun, plural). I’m perfectly happy with the concept of legal rights. In fact I’m all in favor of legal rights, and think we should have more of them. But because a right is basically a legal concept that depends on rules, when we talk about morality in terms of rights, we assume that there are moral rules. And I don’t think morality consists of rules. For that reason, henceforth I will refer to moral rights as “rights”, in so-called scare quotes, to alert you to the fact that I don’t think they really exist, and that all I’m talking about is the (rather misguided) concept of “rights”.

The intuition above (about what’s wrong with gladiatorial combat) can be expressed in terms that do not mention moral “rights” at all. We assume that the “right to life” trumps the “right to be entertained”, but what makes us assume such a thing? – I submit that we put “rights” to life, autonomy, liberty, etc., on an entirely different plane from any “right to be entertained” because we recognize an important psychological fact about people. Normal people choose to avoid being attacked with spears, or eaten by lions, or anything like that, with extreme prejudice. We very decisively choose to avoid getting killed. But we don’t decisively choose to avoid getting bored. (This explains why we occasionally find ourselves sitting in a theater.) If we cannot complete any of our projects in life because we’re dead, that’s a catastrophe. On the other hand, if we can’t visit the coliseum this evening, it’s no big deal – we can always go to an orgy instead. Much the same applies to autonomy. We can never willingly relinquish our own autonomy, almost “by definition”. But we can easily and willingly relinquish our plans for an evening’s entertainment.

If strength of preference were the sort of thing that could be measured, we might measure it by considering the ratio of “situations in which I would choose A in preference to B” versus “situations in which I would choose B in preference to A”. For example, I prefer wine to beer – by a ratio of about ten to one. I prefer staying alive to being dead – by a ratio of any figure you’d care to mention to zero. Absolute zero. I also prefer being the author of my own destiny to being the subject of someone else’s sadistic pleasure, again by a ratio of any quantity you like to zero. Not-a-sausage zero. Not the merest hint of a whiff of anything slightly more than zero.

Ratios are interesting. They can be expressed in fractions. A ratio of zero to anything else, however large or small, is always zero. Conversely, a ratio of anything else to zero is always strictly “undefined” – or in loose metaphorical terms, it’s “infinity”. If the preference of a would-be gladiator versus the preferences of would-be spectators make that sort of a ratio, it doesn’t matter how many countless billions of would-be spectators there are. They can never outweigh the preference of the individual not to be interfered with. Like area versus length, they simply can’t be measured on the same scale. If area beats length, then an acre beats a mile, or a million miles, or a trillion zillion miles.

I think we all recognize, vaguely, that a preference not to be eaten by lions is guaranteed to be stronger than a preference to watch someone else get eaten by lions, no matter how many potential spectators there may be. That’s the real reason why we have the intuition about the “rights” of the potential gladiator.

We can acknowledge that intuition even if we give up talk of “rights”, and talk about preferences instead. All we have to do is carefully consider what people actually do choose in real-life situations, and carefully envisage what they would choose in counterfactual situations. That way, we can get a reasonably good idea of what people prefer, and how strong their preferences are – in other words, we can find out how rigidly attached they are to what they choose.

We have to do this anyway, even if we continue to talk about “rights”, in order to decide which “rights” trump which. I’m just suggesting that we cut out the middleman by respecting actual preferences instead of abstract moral “rights”.

Once we realize that strength of preference is every bit as important as number of people involved, some interesting results follow.

For example, consider voting. Where voting in an election is not compulsory, voters who have stronger preferences about the outcome will be more likely to take the trouble to vote. Those who do not care about the outcome will not bother to vote.

It’s obviously a bad thing for people who care about the outcome of an election to be unable to vote, or to feel so alienated from the electoral system that they refuse to vote. But I think it’s a good thing for people who care less to have less of a “say” in the outcome of an election. Voter apathy can be a good thing.

It adds an extra dimension to the voting process. Proportional representation makes the outcome of an election more sensitive to the numbers of voters for each party. Non-compulsory voting adds a further degree of sensitivity by taking account of the strength of opinion of the people.

In Ireland, we have just had a referendum. The votes are being counted as I write. Pre-election polls suggest that the “ayes” outnumber the “noes”. But if the “noes” care more about the outcome, they are more likely to take the trouble to vote. If fewer than half the electorate goes to the polls, each actual voter has the more than twice the “say” he would have had if voting were compulsory. In this way, the “noes” might win, despite being in a minority. That seems to me to be a just outcome.

10 a.m., Friday 13 June, 2008

Our worst failings are the ones we are not on our guard against. For example, conformism is a perennial human failing, and those who regard themselves as immune to it – or worse, who congratulate themselves for having escaped it – are more subject to that failing, not less.

Like everyone else, I regard having false beliefs as a failing. And like many others nowadays, I regard religion as a repository of false beliefs. Of course religions also have one or two wise traditions, a limited amount of worthwhile philosophy, and some great art. So I’m not a militant atheist or an anti-religious fanatic, although I am non-religious.

Or at least, I think I’m non-religious. But I hope I am reflective enough to keep checking. Man is a religious animal, as Burke said, and if we are not on our guard against our own religious urges, we are liable to succumb to them in some unsuspecting way. Humans yield to their religious urges as naturally as kittens chase their own tails. Many people think they’re non-religious, having explicitly rejected belief in God, yet on closer inspection it emerges that they haven’t really rejected many of the other beliefs, expectations, fears, rituals and habits of religion. Above all, they are likely to retain a religious attitude to authority. The people who are regarded as “authorities” are no longer priests but self-described “scientists”. There is also the “authority” of popular opinion – or the tyranny of popular opinion, as JS Mill called it. There really isn’t much point in renouncing the opium of the people, only to take up the morphine of the academic and the crowd.

One of the main consolations of religious belief is the way it helps us deal with the prospect of our own death. On a superficial level we are all aware of our own mortality, but it’s a “propositional” sort of awareness, rather like being aware that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. We accept the proposition that we are going to die as true, but we don’t really know what it means.

The poet Philip Larkin had more than a propositional awareness of death. In his poem Aubade, he described how a more visceral awareness can take hold at four in the morning: “I see what’s really always there: / Unresting death, a whole day nearer now”.

Larkin described religion as a “vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die”. But Larkin would not pretend. He knew we must all die, and that death is annihilation:

… no sight, no sound
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

(I gather that an “aubade” is a traditional poem describing a lovers’ parting in the morning. Larkin’s “lover” in his own aubade is death, which keeps him company till the morning light begins to show through the curtains.)

In a recent article in the Guardian, the novelist Ian McEwan described one notable aspect of the “musical brocade created to pretend we never die”: the phenomenon of “apocalyptic” thinking. There have always been groups of people – mostly religious people – who “externalize” their natural horror of mortality by seeing it not as their own individual annihilation, but rather as the death of the entire human race. If you want a comforting sense of togetherness and distance, don’t dwell on your own individual extinction and removal from the rest of the human race, but let your thoughts settle instead on The End of The World. But there’s a problem. The trouble with The End of The World is, it’s tempting to think it might just possibly be avoided, as long as everyone performs some sort of God-appeasing Act of Atonement. Alas, most proposed God-appeasing Acts of Atonement involve the extermination of the Jews, or the launching of a Children’s Crusade, or some other hateful idiotic nonsense guaranteed to kill thousands.

Typically, apocalyptic religious cults have a peculiar reverence for numbers. It is as if numbers have an aura of rigor, which suggests that numerical divination is uniquely trustworthy. Here is McEwan:

One senses in the arithmetic of prophecy the yearnings of a systematising mind, bereft of the experimental scientific underpinnings that were to give such human tendencies their rich expression many centuries later. Astrology gives a similar impression of numerical obsession operating within a senseless void.

McEwan is quite right to identify experiment as the missing element in this sort of thinking. In science – genuine science, I mean, not any old moth-eaten, flea-bitten, oldest-swinger-in-town-ideology-ridden academic discipline calling itself a “science” – explanatory hypotheses are subject to tests. A hypothesis yields a prediction, in other words, something that can be observed in the future. Then, if the prediction turns out to be true, the hypothesis is “corroborated”. In other words, we have a better reason to believe it, although of course we can never reach anything like certainty.

McEwan is also right to warn us that not all apocalyptic cults are religious:

We should add to the mix more recent secular apocalyptic beliefs – the certainty that the world is inevitably doomed through nuclear exchange, viral epidemics, meteorites, population growth or environmental degradation.

Now, at this point, any sensible person with a passing knowledge of how “climate change scientists” do their work will immediately identify that (profitable) industry as a fine example of a secular apocalyptic cult. Alas, the words McEwan has used – ‘environmental degradation’ – hint at an extraordinary oversight  to come: McEwan makes an exception of “climate change science”. Despite the presence of all the usual suspect indicators, McEwan thinks this is not a cult, and we really are facing an apocalypse!

And if we let global temperatures continue to rise because we give room to the faction that believes it is God’s will, then we are truly – and literally – sunk.

Oh dear. Let us pass over the fact that no one has ever claimed that global warming is “God’s will”. Let us pass over his metaphorical use of the word ‘literally’. We simply cannot pass over the fact that McEwan is blissfully unaware that “climate change science” puts its faith in numbers rather than testing, just like the other apocalyptic cults he has been warning us against. Its projections are based on computer modeling. But the unbroken rule of all computer modeling is GIGO: “garbage in, garbage out”. A computer model is only as good as the numbers it goes to work on. In the case of “climate change science”, these numbers are largely got from agreement among “climate change scientists”, which means they aren’t much better than if they had been plucked out of thin air. For example, how much does water vapor contribute to the greenhouse effect? – Much more than carbon dioxide, sure, but how much more? Climate change “scientists” guess, as do genuine scientists, but they tend to guess the same figures so as to disguise the fact that they are guessing. Global warming seems to be happening on Mars and Jupiter as well as Earth, so the Sun probably plays a part. How much of a part? You’ve guessed it – another guess, agreed-upon to disguise the fact that it’s a guess. And so on… When many different computer simulations go to work on much the same “garbage in”, it is hardly surprising that they produce lmuch the same “garbage out”. Yes, the oracles agree – which adds to the sense that they are oracles.

“Climate change science” is not subject to testing. Inasmuch as we can treat its computer-generated projections as the predictive yield of implicit hypotheses, those hypotheses fail the tests, because these predictions have so far proved false. In an attempt to disguise that fact, practitioners of this self-described “science” no longer refer to “global warming” but instead to “climate change”. The very term ‘climate change’ is designed to say nothing about the future, such as “it will be warmer”.

McEwan’s failure to apply his professed epistemic principles to “climate change science” is staggering, and it marks him as a second-rate thinker. He is aware of the importance of curiosity and testing – “it is curiosity, scientific curiosity, that has delivered us genuine, testable knowledge of the world” – but he is unprepared to question the supposed authority of the “climate change scientists” or the consensus of (largely ignorant) popular opinion. Curiosity is good, but it isn’t enough. We need tests. We need to be skeptical about ideas that have not been tested, and reject those that have failed tests.

If McEwan adopted a properly skeptical attitude, he would see that we do not know what “climate change” involves. And even if we did, we do not know whether it is actually happening. And even if we did, we do not know whether human activity is the cause. And even if we did, we do not know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. And even if we did, we do not know whether it is in our power to do anything effective about it. And even if we did, we do not know whether our “cure” would be better or worse than the “disease” itself. There is an awful lot we don’t know here.

One thing we do know is that if we take steps that seriously damage the world’s economies, the price of food will keep rising, and people will starve. Another thing we know is that the mind of Man is capable of solving many problems as they arise.

There is little doubt that light consists of waves. One of the surest indications that this is so is the fact that light creates interference patterns, like waves on the surface of the sea. (Ocean-going interference patterns, when superimposed in statistically infrequent ways – infrequent, yet inevitable given enough time – can produce monster waves quite capable of sinking large ships.)

With light waves, interference patterns can be carefully observed and measured by setting up a “two-slit” experiment. But anyone can see them in a haphazard way by simply half-closing their eyes in orange street-lighting (i.e. by allowing sodium light, which is nearly monochromatic, to pass through the gaps between the eyelashes).

However, there is just as little doubt that light consists of particles as well. A beam of light can be dimmed, further and further, till it consists of just individual particles (called “photons”) leaving the source one after another. Through microscopically small, two or three individual photons can be detected by the human eye, if it is accustomed to total darkness for a decent length of time.

How can light be both a wave and a particle? – It is baffling. Now prepare yourself for something even more baffling. Suppose you set up a familiar two-slit experiment, with light leaving a source, passing through two slits, and hence forming interference fringes on the other side. Next, suppose you turn down the light source, so that just one photon leaves it at a time. You can turn it right down, to the point where only one photon leaves it per week – or one per year, if you like. You might expect the interference pattern not to form, reasoning that it would require photons to interact with each other like waves. But actually that is not so. The interference pattern still forms, although of course it does so very slowly. In reality, the photons are statistically more likely to end up in the bright bands rather than the dark bands of the interference pattern. The statistical frequency exactly matches the familiar pattern formed when the light pours out from the source in an unbroken train of waves.

How is this happening? Many will tell you that a single photon must somehow manage to be “in both places at once” at the crucial juncture when it passes through the slits. Some will tell you that there is “no fact of the matter” as to which slit a photon passes through until you observe it. Some will go still further and tell you that there is no such thing as objective reality at all, as it depends on “interaction with consciousness”. Some will tell you that the entire universe splits in two whenever alternatives of this sort arise. Some will speak darkly of Yin and Yang…

Speaking as a realist, my advice is to believe none of those “explanations”!

Instead of plumping for a bloated and extravagant metaphysical thesis about multiple universes, or the mystical reality-creating powers of consciousness, I suggest we adopt a more modest course. Let us modestly admit that we really don’t know what is happening. We can, however, imagine the sort of thing that might be happening by picturing something medium-sized, reasonably familiar, and easy to visualize – something that does pretty much the same thing as the mysterious photons. Instead of taking an extravagant theory literally, let us consider an elaborate analogy instead, making sure that we only take it metaphorically, as a model of reality rather than a literal description of reality. I submit that some of the mystery will disappear.

Here goes. Photons actually behave in many ways like jellyfish. Consider the common “moon” jellyfish, which consists of a simple hemispherical bell, pulsing its way forwards through the water. In pulsing, the jellyfish simply flattens its bell, then forms it into a more voluminous shape which captures water inside, which it then squeezes out to jet itself forwards. It does this over and over again.

Like jellyfish, photons also “pulse”. Each photon has its own frequency, and because all photons move at the same speed, a high frequency is the same as a short wavelength. The photons of red light pulse more slowly than the photons of blue light. That again is very easy to visualize with any “swimmers” – some use short, rapid strokes while others use long, slow strokes.

When a jellyfish pulses along, it affects the water all around it, for quite some considerable distance. This can be seen easily if there are little bits of stuff suspended in the water nearby. The water in front gets pushed away from the center to the sides to make room for the advancing jellyfish; the water on either side gets pushed backwards as the jellyfish moves forwards; and the water behind closes up again to form a vortex – a “doughnut” of liquid that “rolls” in the direction of its own axis like a smoke ring. When you consider that jellyfish themselves consist almost entirely of water, it’s easy to think of one not as something discrete and sharply differentiated from the water it moves through, but rather as a sort of “center of disturbance” of disturbed water.

Like all subatomic particles, a photon too is a “center of disturbance” of the space it moves through. The word ‘particle’ is rather misleading, as it suggests a tiny billiard ball moving through the void, rather than the center of disturbance of various fields (electric, magnetic, gravitational, etc.). Space itself is hardly the “void” that the Ancient Greeks imagined, but rather an active medium with its own qualities such as “curvature”.

As well as making interference patterns, light does two much simpler, distinctively wave-like things: it changes direction when it passes close to an edge, and it changes direction when it enters a medium it travels at a different speed through (such as glass). So do jellyfish, on both counts, and in the same way.

First, imagine a jellyfish pulsing past an edge of some sort such as the concrete column of a pier. If it passes close enough, the water between it and the solid object cannot move as freely as the water on the far side. This affects its motion, because the jet on the far side will be stronger. This asymmetry causes the path of the jellyfish to “adhere” slightly to the solid object as it passes, bending its direction slightly towards the solid object. An entire shoal of jellyfish passing through a narrow space between two solid objects will spread out, just like a narrow beam of light passing through a slit.

Next, imagine a jellyfish passing into a more dense medium (such as colder water). If it enters a body of denser water head-on, it will just slow down. But if the jellyfish enters the body of denser water obliquely, so that one side enters it first, that entering side will be slowed down, while the other side will keep going for a little bit longer at its original speed. That makes the whole jellyfish change direction. Once again, it does so in exactly the same way as a photon entering a glass prism or lens.

Finally, consider a jellyfish swimming through one of two narrow slits. Although the jellyfish itself passes through just one of them, as a center of disturbance of water, the entire disturbance affects the water around both slits. The vortices I mentioned earlier will form at some angles better than at other angles, because they will divide up as they pass through the slits and re-form on the other side, sometimes with each half “out of step” with the other. Those angles correspond to the angles where photons form bright bands of an interference fringe. Please note that these angles depend on the frequency of pulsing, and do not require any more than a single photon/jellyfish at a time.

So much for my elaborate analogy. Perhaps it is “extravagant” in the same way as the mystical theories I criticized above. Even if it is, an extravagant analogy that honestly tries to appeal to our intuitions is not as bad as an extravagant theory that purports to literally describe reality.

I repeat: we do not know what photons are really like in all their details. But rather than throwing our intuitions to the winds and embracing a metaphysical outrage, isn’t it better to modestly say, “photons are probably a bit like jellyfish”?

Famously, JS Mill wrote:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

But almost ten years before he wrote those words in his 1863 essay Utilitarianism, Mill wrote the following in an entry in his diary:

Quality as well as quantity of happiness is to be considered; less of a higher kind is preferable to more of a lower. The test of quality is the preference given by those who are acquainted with both. Socrates would rather choose to be Socrates dissatisfied than to be a pig satisfied. The pig probably would not, but then the pig knows only one side of the question: Socrates knows both.

I think these earlier words are historically fascinating, and philosophically profound.

The passage is interesting historically for two reasons. First, it reveals something of Mill’s personality. He was clearly the sort of guy to mull over an idea or analogy before committing it to print. In this, he was like his contemporary Darwin, who took twenty years rather than Mill’s ten. Second – and the reason why it is so philosophically profound – the passage represents both a bridge to, and a break with, the traditional hedonism of the Epicureans.

Epicurus and his followers were hedonists – that is, they judged the value of everything in terms of pleasure. (Not just their own, I hope I don’t have to explain.) For example, a morally right act would be one that increased pleasure for all concerned. Similarly, in the theater, a good play would be one that generated a lot of pleasure in the audience.

For various reasons, the Epicureans had to draw a distinction between “higher” and “lower” pleasures. (Roughly, this is the distinction between comfort and joy.) For example, relief from thirst was a higher pleasure than getting drunk. To a thirsty, non-abstemious person, a cold, strong beer would have hit both spots. And so on.

Mill’s diary entry echoes the Epicurean distinction between “higher” and “lower”, but something absolutely crucial has changed. He has started to talk about happiness rather than pleasure. There’s much, much more to happiness than pleasure.

Pleasure is a type of conscious experience, but happiness is a type of situation to be in. The former has everything to do with the way things seem to be arranged. The latter has everything to do with the way things really are arranged. In other words, the latter has a lot to do with luck. (Words like ‘happen’ and ‘happenstance’ have similar Icelandic origins. I know this because I once walked past an Icelandic Lotto outlet with a language expert.)

My father was a boy of eleven when the Second World War began, and an adolescent of seventeen when it ended. He always spoke of those years as the “happiest days of his life”. He was being funny and extravagantly amoral, as always, but he was honestly expressing a truth too: we are happy when we are doing things that we consider worthwhile, however little pleasure we may get as an experiential “reward” for doing them.

Mill’s understanding of happiness is subtle and complicated – as befits a subtle and complicated subject. It has a lot to do with what we count as the “quality” of life. Here’s a reminder of the way Mill judges the quality of the life of Socrates and the life of a satisfied pig:

The test of quality is the preference given by those who are acquainted with both.

There is a theory of value taking shape here. Mill would regard nothing as inherently valuable, i.e. as valuable in itself. Something is valuable only because a conscious agent prefers it to something else. If I’m prepared to sell my gold ring for a glass of water, then a glass of water is more valuable to me than a gold ring.

As far as I know, Mill’s diary entry is the first expression of preference utilitarianism, the form of utilitarianism based on this “relative” understanding of value. Traditional hedonistic utilitarianism counted pleasure as inherently (i.e. “absolutely”) valuable.

When we look at medium-sized occurrences, such as balls colliding on a pool table, what we always actually see is a large number of particles interacting with each other. That involves the dissipation of motion. The “break” at the start of a game of pool or snooker is the most obvious example of the dissipation of motion, but of course it occurs at the microscopic level as well. A rolling ball knocks aside molecules of air, which absorb some of its momentum. They speed up, and it slows down. When the balls collide with each other, more dissipation occurs. They get distorted slightly, which causes the plastic molecules they are made out of to squeeze together, which makes them push each other apart – always a bit too much, which causes them to retract again, and so on. In other words, they vibrate, which causes them to heat up slightly.

In short, macroscopic events involving large numbers of particles always involve the dissipation of motion. That’s why no pool ball will ever keep rolling forever, nor can it be perfectly elastic.

Imagine various physical processes in the universe. Some of them are symmetric with respect to time, and others are not. For example, a perfectly elastic ball that bounces up and down over and over again – to the same height with every bounce – will keep going forever. If you made a movie of that happening and played the movie backwards, it wouldn’t look different from the proper forwards-playing movie. In the real world, of course, no balls are perfectly elastic, because their motion is dissipated, creating noise and heat.

Or again, if you took a movie of the entire solar system, with all of the planets going round the Sun in one direction, and then played it backwards, the only obvious difference is that the planets would go round in the other direction. As long as you ignore the weather and the tides on the planets – processes that really do involve the dissipation of motion – the most basic mechanism of the solar system is time-symmetric.

Now to speculate: suppose that all of the time-asymmetry in the universe is the result of the dissipation of motion. If there is a very close conection between dissipation of motion and time-asymmetry, then processes in which there is no such dissipation of motion might all be time-symmetric.

Events that occur on a microscopic scale are indeed like that, as long as they only essentially involve very small numbers of particles. Their time-symmetry helps to explain much of their strangeness and unfamiliarity to our eyes – eyes that are accustomed to the dissipation of motion in familiar macroscopic processes, and completely unaccustomed to time-symmetry.

For example, consider the behavior of light particles. Light changes direction when it passes from one medium into another (such as from a vacuum into glass, or from air into water). It so happens that the path light takes in travelling between any two points – from A to B, say – is the path that takes the least amount of time to traverse. That is remarkable. – But it can be explained in terms of time-symmetry.

Consider the path that leads from A to B in the diagram above. It might be the path that a lifeguard A takes as he runs across the sand and into the water to rescue B, a swimmer in difficulty. Or it might be the path that swimmer B takes as he runs out of the water to apprehend thief A, who is rifling through the pockets of the clothes he left on the beach. Both of those paths have a kink in them because of the constraint that they be traversed in minimum time (which they are, roughly, as long as the people involved know they can move faster over sand than through water).

Such a path might also be the one that light follows as it travels from A to B, with the light travelling more slowly in the lower medium than in the upper medium.

How does light “figure out” where it should end up? If we assume that the movement of light is time-symmetric, this is a mistaken question. The departure point has the same “status” with respect to time as the destination point. There isn’t any question about how light “knew” where to start off from, so there isn’t any question about how it “knew” where to end up. The only apparent question is how it “knew” which intermediate points to take as it “chose” its path between them. But recall our assumption of time-symmetry. If light took a path that did not take the minimum time, it would have to stray off that path, to the right or to the left, say. Suppose it strays off the path to the left when traveling from A to B. Then, looking at that path with the time direction reversed, it would also have to stray off to the left when travelling in the other direction, from B to A. If it strayed off to the right instead, the whole process would lose its time-asymmetry, because it demands that processes look the same from either direction. In other words, if the process is time-symmetric, then straying off to one side when the path is traced from past to future entails straying off in the same direction when the path is traced from future to past. The same applies when we consider its straying off in any direction. Straying to the right, or up, or down, or anywhere off the shortest path is a violation of time-asymmetry.

In effect, the path the light “chooses” is like a thread that is drawn as tight as it can be between two end-points. As with all “tightness” of threads, there is no “slack”, with a slight twist: slack in loose cotton thread is entiely spatial, because any slack means its length in space could be shorter; “slack” in a beam of light would be “spatio-temporal” because any such slack here means its duration (i.e. its length in time) as it passes through space could be shorter. The time-symmetry of light particles entails that no such “slack” can exist with light.

The Ancient Greeks believed in atoms. Or rather, they believed in the existence of what they called “atoms” – tiny particles of matter that “cannot be cut” or subdivided any further. What we call atoms can be “split” into smaller constituent parts – protons, electrons, neutrons, etc.. But the old idea of un-cut-able a-toms is still intuitively compelling. Suppose we do keep cutting matter into smaller and smaller parts: will we eventually reach rock-bottom, particles that cannot be subdivided any further? If so, they would be the fundamental constituents of matter. Scientists are currently trying to find out if they can isolate the most basic particles of all, using unnatural amounts of energy to do so. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.

A vaguely analogous project was undertaken by Descartes in his Meditations. He was trying to isolate the most basic constituents of knowledge. – Huh? – It seemed to him that everything we know must be “justified” either by being basic and certain itself, or else by being based on something more basic and certain.  So he began to “dig” down into the everyday beliefs he had hithero considered as knowledge, by actively doubting absolutely everything it was possible to doubt. He would accept nothing except what had to be accepted because it could not be doubted. First off, he couldn’t claim to know anything about the world outside his own mind. He might think he was sitting by the fire in his dressing-gown with a piece of paper in his hand, but he might only be dreaming that he’s sitting by the fire in his dressing gown. And so on…

Descartes thought he had hit rock-bottom when he tried to doubt the existence of his own self. He could doubt the existence of his own body – after all, he might be a ghost – but he couldn’t doubt that he was thinking, experiencing center of consciousness. “What is this ‘I’ that I am?” he asked. His answer: I am a thinking thing. Cogito ergo sum – “I think, therefore I am”.

By the way, what Descartes really meant by “I am a thinking thing” is “I am a conscious, sentient thing.”

Although that may seem undeniable at first, there is more to it than first appears. Descartes wasn’t just claiming that “thinking is going on”, but that his self was thinking – he was assuming the “‘I’ that I am” is an indivisible, “atomic” center of consciousness.

And that certainly can be doubted. Some time after Descartes, Hume toyed with the idea that his self was just a bundle of experiences of various kinds. He never sees his “self” as a single subject having those experiences. That was a real departure. Much later, in the twentieth century, some patients with extremely severe epilepsy underwent an operation which in effect prevented direct communication between the left and right sides of their brains. Consciousness itself was not significantly diminished, apparently, but it certainly was disrupted, and in ways that strongly suggest our “atomic” consciousness is nothing of the sort. The ease with which these patients were able to “multi-task” became rather an inconvenience for them. Various experiments and observations revealed that at times their “left hands didn’t know what their right hands were doing”. And yet most of the time their overall mental integrity remained intact. It shows that when the rest of us “multi-task” in the usual way, our brains rule our bodies more like a “parliament” than a “king”. And we all “multi-task” all the time.

The main lesson I learn from Descartes’ certainty that he was “atomic” is this: we feel subjectively certain about whatever we are familiar with. But a subjective feeling of certainty is not objective certainty, which is anyway impossible. To be a philosopher, a person must try to lose his familiarity with familiar things. He must force himself into exile, as it were, so that he is a stranger in a strange land.

There are many lessons to be learned from Descartes’ Meditations, many of them the very opposite of what Descartes intended. But that is one lesson that he did intend.

Most of the world’s population thinks that consciousness continues after death. The “default” condition of Man is to believe that your self or soul will survive the death of your physical body.

To manage that, the self or soul would have to be rather special. It would have to be distinct in some way from the rest of the physical world. A vast amount of bad philosophy begins with the assumption that the mind, self or soul – it doesn’t matter what we call it as long as we understand it as an individual’s center of consciousness and agency – is not part of the physical world at all. The body may be a purely physical machine, but the mind commanding it is a “ghost in the machine”.

The idea we are considering here is very widespread, but it got its most rigorous treatment in Descartes’ dualism – his theory that there are two “substances” (i.e. two kinds of stuff that can exist on their own). One of them is matter, whose distinctive characteristic is that it is extended in space (i.e. it takes up room) and the other is a more mysterious “immaterial substance”, whose distinctive characteristic is that it is conscious.

Now for the bad news. Cartesian dualism is probably mistaken. (Cartesian  = “of Descartes”.) There is just too much perfectly obvious interaction between the physical world and the mind to take it seriously. For example, getting a knock on the head or drinking a bottle of gin (i.e. physical events) affects the mind. A decision to take the bus (i.e. a conscious mental event) affects your physical body (because it causes you to stand at a bus stop). If physical events routinely cause mental events, and vice versa, surely any mental event is just a special sort of physical event?

Almost all present-day philosophers would answer Yes. Most of them have abandoned the “default opinion” of Man. However, this is easier said than done. In trying to slough off the default opinion, they have to try to embrace a rather unnatural new opinion. So it is hardly surprising that many of them have only half-embraced it. Despite openly professing to reject Cartesian dualism, many continue to suffer from its after-effects – the many misguided and misleading assumptions that are part of the dualist package.

I was once invited to give a speech to some academic psychologists. I gave my talk the title “The Worst Hangover of All Time”. This was meant to suggest that although we are trying to “sober up” from the effects of Cartesian dualism, having explicitly rejected it, most of us have yet to completely de-toxify our minds of its noxious assumptions.

For example, it’s reasonable to think that everything that happens is caused to happen. But if so, are all the decisions we make determined by conditions that existed before we were born? How then could we be genuinely free? – This old problem of “free will versus determinism” is widely held to have been solved by philosophers such as Hobbes and Hume, who gave much thought to cause and effect. Our decisions and actions are caused, they said, but being caused is different from being coerced. Only if we are coerced are we unfree. Many people find this solution unsatisfactory. But their dissatisfaction is the result of an unreasonable assumption, a symptom of our Cartesian hangover. We are wrong-footed by a mistaken expectation: we expect genuine freedom to mean not being part of the causal fabric of the universe at all. In other words, we assume that being free means having a non-physical mind. The “ghost in the machine” may be the “pilot”, but we don’t much like the idea of the pilot being “strapped into the pilot’s seat”.

As another example, consider motivation. What motivates us to do anything? The almost universal answer – and the wrong answer, in my opinion – is to say that we do things in order to get pleasure. Suppose I build a tree house, which involves physical discomfort of various kinds. Why do I do it? – The standard answer is that I am going for “deferred” pleasure. As soon as I see my children enjoying themselves in the tree house I built, I will get pleasure, the thing I’m “really” after.

I don’t think so. I think I undergo the physical discomfort because I want to have a tree house. I don’t want a distinctive sort of experience. I want things in the world to be arranged in a particular way – planks of wood nailed to branches of a tree. The reason why we assume we do things for pleasure is we suppose we are disconnected from the physical world. We suppose our minds are “self contained” centers of experience, with their own internal economy of pains and pleasures, rather than an integral part of the physical world. The “ghost in the machine” supposedly has its own “spiritual” ends that exist wholly within its separate realm of consciousness.

As a final symptom of our Cartesian hangover, consider knowledge. It is widely held that to know anything, we must have a true belief that is “justified”. What does it mean for a belief to be “justified”? – Supposedly, it must be based on experience. To know that there is an orange in front of me, say, I must have the experience of an orange-colored disk in my visual field. This assumption leads to trouble, as Descartes himself was famously aware. What if I am merely dreaming that an orange is in front of me, and in reality I am lying asleep in bed?

These considerations lead some people to think that knowledge is impossible. But instead of rejecting the possibility of knowledge, we should reject the supposition that all knowledge is “based” on conscious experience. An insect, which probably has no conscious experience at all, can form a reliable “map” in its head of the world outside its head. That is a rudimentary form of knowledge, and it depends on reliable causal connections between its brain and the physical world outside its brain. Those causal connections are the very thing that a “ghost in the machine” cannot have.

I already mentioned the bad news: death is annihilation. But there’s a little bit of good news too: there probably aren’t any ghosts, either in the machine or anywhere else.

Here is one of the most profound insights in philosophy, from David Hume’s Treatise, written around 1740:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention wou’d subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason.

The point of this passage is that there are no moral facts. In other words, when we say something is right or wrong, it isn’t right or wrong because of the way things are arranged in the world. Nor is it right or wrong because logic alone compels us to accept it as one or the other.

When we say something is morally right, we express our approval of it. We mean something like: “I would like everyone to behave like that!” That sort of expression is neither true nor false. To use Hume’s old-fashioned word, it expresses a ’sentiment’.

That should disturb you – in fact I rather hope it does. But after you’ve been set adrift a bit, in other words made to think, I think you’ll see that Hume has uttered a very profound truth. There are no moral truths, and that itself is a truth.

So what can we appeal to when we disagree with each other morally? Is it all simply a matter of personal taste? No. It is a matter of reasonableness. If you want to persuade me of something that you are already morally committed to, you cannot point to a fact and say, “there – I told you so!” But you can give me your reasons, and I can give you my reasons for disagreeing with you. If we agree on anything at all, and share any goals at all, the reasons we can give each other can have real persuasive power. But we all share some beliefs and some goals. In fact these reasons – reasons that appeal to shared “sentiment” – can have every bit as much persuasive power as observations of facts. So if you were worried about losing something, just a few minutes ago when Hume showed you that there are neither moral truths nor moral facts, what exactly were you worried about losing? Hmm?

Today’s topic is filed under the category “Mind and evolution”. I have purposely avoided the term “evolutionary psychology”. Although the latter ostensibly aims at understanding the mind from an evolutionary perspective, it has so far done little better than extend the methods of academic psychology a bit beyond its traditional “blank slate” view of the mind. I reject those methods because I regard them as unscientific.

As an example of the sort of sloppy thinking that evolutionary psychologists get up to, consider the popular idea that there are “alpha male” humans. The idea is all wrong, I think, and it’s misinformed by bad logic and bad ideology.

It’s bad logic, because it’s really an “argument by analogy” gone wrong. In an argument by analogy, two things are noted as sharing various characteristics, and then a further characteristic of one of them is extrapolated to the other. Here’s an example of a perfectly good argument by analogy:

A has four legs, and B has four legs
A barks, and B barks
A fetches sticks, and B fetches sticks
A wags its tail
Therefore, B wags its tail as well (probably).

That is a pretty good argument, because tail-wagging is a typical characteristic of dogs. (It’s an inductive argument rather than a valid deductive argument, if anyone’s interested.)

Here’s an example of a bad argument by analogy:

A has four legs, and B has four legs
A barks, and B barks
A fetches sticks, and B fetches sticks
A responds to the name “Hieronymus”
Therefore, B responds to the name “Hieronymus” as well (probably).

This is a bad argument because responding to the name “Hieronymus” is not a typical characteristic of dogs. Arguments by analogy work when the characteristics in question are truly representative of their respective kinds.

The supposedly “scientific” grounds for thinking there are human alpha males follows a similar pattern:

A has a humanoid body (bipedal, hands, face, etc.), and B has a humanoid body
A uses tools, and B uses tools
A has genes x, y, z,…, and B has genes x, y, z,…
A belongs to a species that has alpha males
Therefore, B belongs to a species that has alpha males (probably).

The reason why that’s a bad argument by analogy is that there is no such thing as a “typical ape reproductive strategy”. The reproductive strategy of a given ape species can never be representative of apes in general, because apes have diverse reproductive strategies. For example, gorillas are polygamous, but gibbons are monogamous. Even very closely related species such as chimpanzees and bonobos have strikingly different sexual arrangements and different societies. These reproductive strategies are diverse in the same way as dogs’ names are diverse in the above example.

Some people assume that the genetic closeness of humans and chimpanzees means we are “really” chimpanzees in disguise. Scratch Tarzan and you’ll find Cheeta underneath. But very small genetic differences can lead to very great behavioral and functional differences. There are half a dozen species of Galapagos finch, and they are genetically very similar to each other. But their eating habits are completely diverse. Their similarities in other respects (similar habitat, similar metabolic rate, etc.) drove the diversification of their eating habits. They had to diversify in order to exploit the limited food supply.

Instead of relying on a “sophisticated” argument, evolutionary psychologists should simply observe the living world. The living world of humans, that is, not of chimpanzees. If they did, they would see that human life is full of conflict and competition, but there’s nothing like a single sexual hierarchy. It’s more a feeding frenzy than a pecking order. Women are attracted to rich, clever, tall, charming men, with no single characteristic “trumping” all the others. Henry Kissinger might charm the pants off one woman, yet repel another. One woman’s Shaggy is another woman’s George Formby.

I mentioned above that the human “alpha male” idea was bad ideology as well as bad logic. What I meant was this. Some people find the idea very attractive. Men like it because it suggests that men are “tough”. Women like it because it suggests that men are stupid.

Underneath the surface, there’s a sort of Hitler-Stalin pact between laddish men and feminists. The laddish men embrace the idea that the proper role for men is “slugging it out in the world of competition”, whereas feminists embrace the idea that women remain in charge of the home, where they have always dominated. These supposed “opposites” have remarkably similar agendas, and remarkably similar ideologies, which helps explain why they dislike each other so much.